I am an audiophile and do not recommend Creative Lab sound cards because they are for kids. Electrolyte capacitors are not great for audio which I am seeing all over the board. They do well filtering DC, but mylar and polypropylene capacitor types are the best for audio.

I have an Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 that far exceeds the quality of Creative Labs sound cards and it can handle 192 KHz with 24-bit audio resolution for all 8 channels with out dithering. Audiotrak has came out with a Hi--Fi version that has better specifications and an radio interference shield to minimize coloration of the audio. Audiotrak sound cards work in Linux while Creative Labs X-Fi does not.

MIDI can be done through Ethernet.

very informative...i wish they could compare the Prelude with Xonar in a review of the latter

Dear Sergey Romanov,

Have you ever heard of a PCI soundcard produced by Onkyo under the range WAVIO.

The card is Onkyo WAVIO SE-200PCI which I find that is audiophile oriented PCI soundcard.

Here's a link to the card (Japanese):
http://onkyo.jp/wavio/se_200pci/index.htm

If you can do a test on this card and do a head-to-head battle between the Auzentech and this Onkyo card, I believe it'll very very interesting !!!

^_^

Just found this article after having owned this card for a month or so. I was excited to read about the front panel headphone output being somehow superior, I tried it and it sounds like utter garbage. The headphone bypass on my Logitech computer speakers sounds far better as does the output straight from the card. I'm sure I have it hooked up right so I'm don't know what's wrong. Does the quality of the front panel port play a role or are they simple pass-through?

Headphones are Grado S80. I probably just need a heaphone amp of some sort but my experience with the front panel port so far is a big thumbs down.