First of all allow me to state that I am only a novice audiophile. I've spent some money on audio products before, but the $200 investment in the NU audio card was a big thing for me. Before using NU Audio, I was running my Sennheiser 650HD's with the $100 Fulla Schiit Amp/DAC. Now the fulla provided enough ohms to pump quality audio into my HD 650's but I wanted a little more out of my audio setup. Hence I purchased the NU Audio card.
My first impression of the card was that all my music sounded noticeably better immediately after installing. However, once I installed the EVGA drivers for the card, that impression was kind of ruined. If you've been following the NU Audio forums at all you'll know that the NU Audio EVGA drivers have been a train wreck straight from launch. With the drivers not working, I couldn't crank up the integrated amp in the card to deliver enough power to my 650HD's. So I actually ended up having to take a line out from my NU Audio card and run it through the integrated amp on my Fulla Schitt. When the EVGA Nu Audio driver was finally fixed, I was able to plug my 650's straight into the NU Audio card backplate and noticed a jump in audio quality when I was able to tinker with the audio presets in the Nu Audio software.
As far as how the NU Audio card sounds, I must say it is very excellent. I've noticed further clarity between the lows and mids on my 650's, and all of my audio somehow sounds a lot "fuller" than it did before. Deeper bass, thundering drums, clearer vocals, crystal clear highs, you name it and the Nu Audio delivers on it. It just sounds good. One sad thing is that I like to use Windows Sonic surround sound on my PC when I am gaming, and that software component doesn't support super high bitrate multichannel audio output. So I've been stuck using 16 channel 18000hz audio output which is kind of sad considering how high EVGA Nu can go with channels and output. (Not sure if this is something EVGA could work on, or if it is on Microsoft's end.)
Sometimes when I'm in the mood to dabble in my FLAC collection for long periods of time, I'll crank my audio output to 32 channel 48k output. It may be placebo, but I feel like my FLAC music collection sounds a lot better when I crank up my output on the NU Audio. I also do slightly better on the blind WAV vs 320kbs test on the NPR website when I have the audio output cranked up this far.
As a side note, I do not believe that cranking your audio output all the way up to the max supported audio output is worth your time. (This is why I leave mine at 32ch 48k for FLAC listens instead of all the way up to 192kHz) There is a great read up here: https:// people.xiph.org/~ xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html Essentially human ears can only hear so far, and cranking your output all the way up to the ultrasonic level (past what human ears can hear) is useless and potentially dangerous to your ears. (Skip to the 192kHz section of that article for a detailed write up. Author explains way better than I ever could.)
Improvements that I would like to see are increased support for virtual surround sound and further improvements to the EVGA Nu Audio driver software. Also, I'd like to see an option to sync RGB across my other EVGA RGB products in a way that syncs up to my music. That would be super cool!