Xonar phoebus status as of May 2016

[Glasofruix]

Well, it's almost May so 😄

Now, the xonar phoebus was released in 2012, that makes it 4 years old, which should give us a mature product with perfectly ironed out drivers, right? Wrong! Since day one Asus didn't give a rat's a$$ about this product, they've barely managed to fix the punkbuster problem in BF3 and then went silent for months.

Day one bugs are still present, like speaker mismatch with surround configuration and they've finally fixed (i think) netflix DRM problem with the last driver from two days ago, BUT, they've removed about all the dsp effects in the process. For a card that is marketed to gamers it's kind of strange.


A little driver/features history so far (feel free to complete):

- Release date, so far so good, praiseworthy reviews BUT you get kiced out from BF3 because punkbuster thinks you're a cheater.

- Two months later, BF3 is fixed, netflix is broken (or never worked in the first place), speaker mismatch is identified.

- Total silence for about 6 months, because they felt like it or something, small fixes, day one bugs still there.

- Nine months later, new version of the driver without a changelog, then about a month later another driver which supposedly fixed netfilx issues (it didn't), day one bugs still there.

- A few drivers here and there that don't fix anything, asus removed those for whatever reason, i don't know.

- Last drivers before win 10 is released (end of 2014 if i remember correctly) introducing new UI. Xear surround removed, flex bass not there, dts removed, noise cancellation with the control box removed or not working (same thing). I'm still using those btw, because the new ones are even worse.

- Win 10 is released, no new drivers, asus' support tells us to use a "hack" to install old win 8.1 drivers, took them what, 4 months to release a working(ish) win 10 driver? Dolby home theater doesn't work anymore.

- DDL live is broken, not asus' fault (this time), new windows 10 driver, "sound effects bug".

- New driver, no fixes, DDL removed.

- Another driver, old UI, why? No one knows at this point.

- DDL fixed with win 10 1511 update, but asus still doesn't know this.

- Back to sonic studio UI

- April 2016, netflix is fixed apparently (taking your word for it), BUT every dsp effect removed, remember those were marketed as the "ultimate gaming experience", back to the old UI, again.

- Sometimes in the future. Every sound effect removed, no ui, the card will make beeps when it detecs a sound being played, asus will tell us to buy a strix card.

My personnal griefs are that the supposedly better than dolby headphones, dolby home theater never worked as a surround simulation for me. It did expand stereo with the added "benefit" of a tinny cave like sound, but never actually helped to pinpoint sound cues. Xear surround was fine in this aspect, as it managed to fool windows into thinking you had a surround system (thus games defaulted to surround configuration instead of stereo) but the sound quality was awful.
Sonic studio introduced "virtual surround" which impressively induces absolutely no sound quality loss whatsoever. It manages an accurate representation of the soundstage and it's really easy to tell where the sound comes from, in the test... As it is now it's just a stero expand function, not unlike dolby home theater (but better) because windows still thinks you're using a stereo setup and pretty much every game out there checks the control pane for its audio configuration and outputs in stereo.

[Sneeky]

You pay a premium price for a top spec piece of hardware , and get low price support :mad:
i have had mine less than a year and they say its EOL ??? WTF

[Bahz]

The Xonar Phoebus which was released in 2012 so yes this product has been EOL for period of time. Note that you can purchase a product from a retailer that kept stock way longer after it had long stopped in production.

Edit:
FYI it's called retailer not following stock rotation protocols

[Bahz]

Obviously there are people that are unsatisfied with what the current available options right now and there's a reason to be. I want to note that the complaints on the forum relative to the overall number of units shipped is a very low percentage. I understand some people expect every feature and every advertised function to work, we're trying to satisfy that but as mentioned right now the resources are limited but we're not abondoning the support for this product. The next thing is the comparason with Creative which everyone seems to throw around, not every product being compared is apples to apples. Most of the time people use examples of product that are using a different audio chipset and don't have the same issues and of course creating a solution for it would be a lot simpler of a task. When Phoebus came out it there was no Windows 10 or any planned support for this operating system and when it arrived Dolby clearly indicated that they're not providing support for any of their features on Windows 10 (if you don't trust me, please feel free to email Dolby directly). For drivers based on Dolby technology, it's going to become a problem to create something equivalent that will be acceptable for some users.

Demanding is what customers are good at and of course as a customer myself I do the same all the time, and yes I agree that for the driver support part needs a lot of improvement. I have already highlighted and escalated this issue internally and we're doing what we can with all the capabilities we have right now to try and satisfy the demands but this is all we can do at this moment in time.

[Glasofruix]

Bahz wrote:
I understand some people expect every feature and every advertised function to work

Do you understand how a********* that sounds coming from someone representing a company? "Yeah, yeah, we adverised stuff and features and some of you expect those to actually work, well tough luck..." This is what i read.

As for the "different chipset" excuse, sorry, but it justifies ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, because creative actually supports their hardware (which i admit they weren't really known for, but they got their act together) they don't complain that it's "too difficult".
Frankly speaking Asus' support (or lack thereof) is becoming comical. You people release a crapton of products with mouthwatering specs , but then you drop them after a couple of months and release another batch of "new and improved" stuff, it's like you have the attention span of a toddler. And then you go and tell us that you didn't plan on a new version of windows, when it's a known FACT that there's a new release every couple of years. Do you honestly expect people to just drop 200€+ again because a company is too lazy to actually make their top of the line product work?

And we're not "demanding" anything, if you think that expecting a product to work as advertised is being unreasonnable and demanding, then your company needs to reevaluate its business practices.

[Bahz]

I believe you're taking every little thing said and trying to turn it into negativity. Most if not all your posts have been negative, pretty much walking into a trap I can't walk out of. Try to explain something and pretty much get bad mouthed for even trying.

[Glasofruix]

You're not explaining, you're accusing us of "demanding" things as if we were some entitled brats, when all we want is a working driver. And to add insult to injury you tell us that we shouldn't expect advertised features, we paid premium money for, to work which is just infuriating. Thing is, this card NEVER had a correct driver. Every release breaks something and day one bugs remain unsquashed, the latest WTF moment being the removal of all dsp effects. By the time you guys decide to grace us with a new offering i fear the card will only be able to beep loudly, if we're lucky.

It is true that we are a vocal minority of the general user population, but trust me, most of the shipped card have been binned or sold off by the original buyers who don't have the patience to deal with the driver BS.

Don't get me wrong, we do appreciate the communication, greatly. Especially after years of silence. What we don't like is being told that our fancy expensive card is history, when we never had the chance to appreciate it at its fullest. And you're not exactly helping the case by taking us for idiots.

[Bahz]

Well all you do is spout negativity and try to take things the wrong way and to make it into you're "taking us by idiots" when I never meant that in any way or in any other disrespectful way, however you'll try to make it into that.

I can't speak for the past as I wasn't there to witness what happened with the driver support in the earlier stages, however I can speak for the recent year. The effort is there and I had countless discussions with the R&D regarding the issues with the Phoebus and what issues we need to address. The engineer working on this project works OT pretty much everyday and has communicated constantly with the audio chipset vendor to work towards a complete solution, worked hard to create a completely new driver and new UI and tested for weeks before releasing that version with the new Sonic Studio only to receive more negative feedback. It's back to the drawing board and since then there has been many beta version they tried testing but of course there were issues so of course these version can't be released. While from the front view it looks like there hasn't been any progress and we had completely abandoned this is not true, the limited resources on this project which there is, has been working hard to find a solution.

I've been sent the latest driver which our R&D feels will be a big step in the right direction, so here I am on a weekend assisting in helping test the driver. This is completely voluntary because none of this is in my job role but I'm happy to assist because I've seen how hard our engineers have worked towards a complete solution. I understand the frustration or constant waiting for something which you invested a lot of money on and it should be working, but we're trying as hard as we can and all I can comment is that the effort has been there regardless if you feel that they're incompetent in bringing the results you expect.

[HeavyHemi]

"I understand some people expect every feature and every advertised function to work..." is still one of the dumbest things I've ever seen a company rep post and further defend it by arguing and insulting your premium level customer(s). I'm on my third ROG Centurion that has failed.
Your premium Phoebus drivers blow but you blame the customers for correctly pointing out how crappy your service is. You just prove that is the case by being total crap as a rep. Your sad story playing victim of how overworked you all are, is utterly irrelevant. All you did was admit as a fact ASUS is TOO CHEAP to properly support the product. Yep, you did. Thanks for wasting all of our time and money over and over.

[slavianr]

I'm still waiting for new drivers for windows 11 .....

[Chinoka]

slavianr wrote:
I'm still waiting for new drivers for windows 11 .....

Windows 10 drivers works ok for Windows 11.

>>> Phoebus-4.29(W10-CR)