I may be a little late to this discussion... but I prefer my DAC to be outside of the machine to reduce as much EMF as possible. The solution I use is an E-MU 0404 USB. A lot of people harp on E-MU since Creative bought them, but I haven't had any issues thus far. I used to be a big fan of M-Audio products, but they don't have a PCIe interface. E-MU also offers the 0404 PCIe on the same site for nearly €50 less than the juli@.
E-MU is what I use for online and offline mastering/remixing. I also have a Behringer X32 board. I know the E-MU 0404 USB is OSX compatible (I even have it working in a VM thru USB) but I'm not sure about the PCIe version.
Hope I didn't muddy the waters too much...
Gringo Vermelho said:
Remember that 'hardware accelerated sound' does not exist on Windows anymore, not even on your X-Fi card. On Vista and up, Creative ALchemy intercepts EAX and DirectSound 3D hardware calls and translates them to OpenAL, which is purely software based.
Remember this is only the case for Creative cards - using the ALchemy I mean. Sound cards that use the CMedia chip (very very common non-Creative sound chip) have software that has been specifically tailored to enable the drivers for these cards to provide full accelerated audio for pretty much every game that supports it, even with EAX games. DirectSound3D GX is as far as I'm aware unique to the drivers for the CMedia chipsets used in these types of cards.
To quote the manufacturer:
DS3D GX 2.5 gaming sound effects and DirectSound 3D hardware enhanced functions on Windows Vista/7. (DirectX/DirectSound 3D compatible)
DirectSound3D GX translates DirectSound calls (ie. stuff that would normally call the hardware directly in XP) to the software level where the drivers for the card can take over. True hardware accelerated audio doesn't exist for Vista and Windows 7, even ALchemy is a mere facsimile of that. The Xonar D2X I have does most of it's normal processing in software, but it does hardware encoding of that to Dolby Digital Live or DTS so I still get full hardware 3D audio. It also has limited X-Fi support (it can do up to EAX 2.0 in software and emulates it up to 5.0).
The biggest difference with the Creative solution is that DS3D GX doesn't need to be modified for each game, it intercepts the normal calls and makes them usable again, something that does need to be done for ALchemy. If a game isn't in ALchemy's definition list, the software does nothing for the game.
So far, every game I've played that can do surround sound, has done so, with awesome fidelity.
And because of the real-time Dolby/DTS encoding you can also get 3D audio through the SPDIF connectors, which is handy when you hook it up to a compatible receiver. No more 2-channel only PCM audio.
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