As I have informed on previous post here, the best way to trace the PCB is to remove as much component as possible. This to make sure some of your tracing process are accurate. Although not mandatory, but seeing I plan to change some components anyway, so removing them would be the best approach 😉

So, here is the Asus Xonar Essence One PCB with almost all capacitors removed.

It was so fun process and took around 15 minutes to remove (nearly) all the capacitors. Cleaning the hole was another story though 😉

PCB

A bag of removed capacitors. Well, I can have use of this for some other purpose.

Capacitor

One unique thing that I noticed was the PCB marking for negative side of capacitor was reversed on this PCB. Normally, we put negative on the white silk screen (as on the power supply PCB of this Asus Xonar Essence One). But on this main PCB (should we call audio board PCB?), the placement was reversed. The white marked silk screen used to place the positive side of the capacitor. This was consistent through the whole audio board PCB. While the power supply PCB would use the standard negative on white silk screen arrangement. So be careful when you have plan remove all the capacitors. You might lose or reverse the orientation between the power supply and the audio board PCB. You wont like the result 😉

CapacitorSide