ASUS ROG Clavis USB-C Gaming DAC ESS 9281 Quad DAC Amplifier AI Noise-Canceling Mic MQA Rendering Aura Sync

I recently bought this and a couple new pairs of headphones to rediscover great audio quality both in music and games. I have many of the bluetooth sony/bose overear/bud offerings and I forgot what I was missing out on. I’ve used the Clavis for 8+ hours a day, everyday for the past couple weeks through both work and gaming. This thing is amazing imo and fits in my ‘mobile desktop’ setup. You need to go into windows sound settings and set the playback rate to 32bit. It works with discord fine and does a great job of noise filtering; Armory Crate is annoying but I had to set the Clavis up once and forget it. I swap between 2 pairs of headphones; KZ KS10 Pro in-ear monitors and the Corsair Virtuoso Pro headset when gaming/need a mic. I find that the Clavis can drive both of these headphones with very little power/volume. You can def blow out your ears if you allow windows volume to go to 100% with these types of headphones through the Clavis. From my pictures you can see I have a TRRS compatible in-line volume adjuster coiled around it to remain a single dongle. This allows me to bring windows volume to 100% and have hardware controlled volume for safety while still letting the mic pass through. Little fuss and great high quality product in my opinion. It’s small with a metal housing with a short braided USBC cable. Also comes with a USBA conversion/extension cable. A volume adjustment would have been welcome and I wouldn’t mind an increased size but I found a solution for it. I highly recommend this little headphone amp!! Read more

What was Asus thinking? The Good: Sound quality is more than excellent when connected to a PC. Volume is extremely loud. The bad: On my phone and Tablet: Volume is TOO low when turned all the way up (Less than 60db) and plays mostly through the left channel on my Samsung S21 Ultra and Galaxy Tab S7+ WiFi version. Headphones used: Bowers and Wilkins P9 Signature wired headphones :($900) 22 Ohms. Read more

This little dac is great for the pc, laptop, cellphone etc. It works as a stand-alone dac or you can use a pc based software to really adjust the settings. It handles most of my headphones well, but I wouldn't recommend it for headphones with over 80ohns impedance as it doesn't have the power to really push them. With others that are 80 ohm and under like the 32ohm that most headphones are the Clavis really comes to life. Great tuning is easy in armory create and these support 32 bit 384khz flac lossless audio. This combined with a great audio source code like Amazon HD music creates an amazing listening experience! As an added bonus the AI noise cancelation works wonderfully, easily muting the door bell and subsequent barking dog from my calls and video chats. Read more

Perfect all-around DAC: iPhone - works with iPhone using the small lightning to usb camera connector iPad Pro - works in usb-c slot + Microphone Use 2016 MacBook Pro - works both in MacOS / Bootcamp Windows 10 + Microphone Use (configuration app only works in Windows 10) Sound is great - works well with Apple Music Unique in that this DAC includes inline microphone capabilities (great for teleconferences when using headset with boom microphone) Read more

Update (2023-May-14): I plugged the device into my PC and out of curiosity, I hit the "Check Update" on Asus Armoury Crate PC software, and there seems to be some update. Although the firmware version still shows 2022/10/31 v0.1.8703 after update, I did find some changes. 1. The channel imbalance for PC/NB mode on Android is gone even without USB-DAC-direct-control software such as UAPP and Neutron. PowerAmp now play 192KHz/32Bit just fine. Although UAPP/Neutron can still push volume a lot louder than PowerAmp, but since the imbalance is fixed, it's very usable. 2. In MOBILE mode, I experienced occasionally device not usable after remove headphone and re-plug-in the headphone, it seems fine now. I changed the rating from 1-star to 4-star after the update, not 5 because I think the customer response could've been better in the first place. === Original Review === Bought the dongle because it can support headphones with Android remote control. I have a Sennheiser HD6XX with a short remote cable(also bought from Amazon), on my previous Moshi USB-C adapter, the adapter makes small buzz sound when nothing is playing. This ASUS has no noise when nothing is playing, and all the remote buttons works fine. There are 2 mode on this adapter, PC/NB vs MOBILE. On latest firmware, the MOBILE mode does not has the issue of left-right imbalance, but it limits to 96KHz/24Bit max. The PC/NB mode only works well on Windows. On macOS, the default volume to 69.7% on the left channel, but only 43.7% (the same value as MOBILE mode) on the right channel. This initial imbalance during handshake is the reason a lot of people complained about left ear being super loud and the right ear darn silent. It may be possible to fix that with a firmware update, but I sent a bug report and the ASUS R&D simply declared "Only MOBILE mode is supported on macOS". On macOS however, one can use Audio MIDI Setup app(inside /Application/Utilities) to manually adjust the channel balance thus fixing the issue manually(although have to be done every time the dongle connects to the Mac) The channel imbalance also cause problem on Android, as Android by default only controls digital gain, not hardware gain, so without using apps that can control the USB DAC directly(such as USB Audio Player Pro, Neutron Music Player, Onkyo HF Player), their is no way to fix channel imbalance. Which is a shame because the MOBILE mode limits the max volume to 43.7% of what the hardware is capable of due to Android cannot change hardware gain. If not for that imbalance problem, this thing could go 384KHz/32Bit with PowerAmp app. (Edit: 192KHz with AAudio output, 384KHz with Hi-Res output) When using apps that can control USB DAC on Android, the microphone is not accessible to phone or message apps(because it's occupied by DAC music apps, and probably some other limitation of Android 13 ), making using a mic remote meaningless. I give only 1-star because the attitude of ASUS R&D is terrible and not really willing to fix that(I doubt them even willing to look into that). The dongle itself does make a great sound if using within limitation. Read more

I purchased this at same time as a $15 competitor, and honestly wanted to like it but for the price it seems to be quieter and less clear than the cheaper competitors version. Ended up returning this. Read more

Using it with Samsung Galaxy S10 playing Amazon Music and local Hi-Res files with USB Audio Player Pro. This DAC is dead quiet and distortion free even at full volume which is more than the volume needed to drive my 31 ohm Meze Audio Advar IEMs. A perfect mobile audiophile solution. Read more