This is an interesting watch.

Thanks for sharing!

I used to use sound cards myself ages ago for MIDI and DirectSound acceleration. I didn't expect the hardware audio codecs to actually make a difference.

Nothing is stopping me from installing a PCIe Sound Blaster with a good old EMU chip. At least I hope so, the EMU10k1 and 20k1 have a hardware DMA bug which breaks them on systems with more than 2GB of memory lol

Not sure if I should go the CMedia route and just use Xonar instead. I do like Creative's features (especially ALchemy), but those you can gain on any machine using a software suite made by Creative themselves.