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This is an audiophile grade sound card.

I remember sound cards! Yeah, they used to look just like this. Wow! A blast from the past.

Damn! There's a limit of 9999 per customer. I wanted 10000 of them but I guess I'll have to pass this time.

Frederico, you're mocking but *if* you had the hardware to appreciate this sound card, and the music to show it off, you'd be singing its praises.

This isn't a "blast from the past." The past never had a sound card this good and you've never seen or heard a sound card this good.

How many people can tell the difference in sound quality between this card and a $50 card when you are using the analog ports? Most people think they can but in reality even if you had perfect hearing and a $10,000 paradigm system you simply CANNOT.
The only time you can is when one card is defective.

As such, there is NO difference in sound quality via the digital out. Anyone who disputes this is a fool.

The only real advantage this card offers is a 7.1 out..and that's it.

#5 I can tell, and so can you if you have the hardware to hear it. I have a pair of Magnepan 3.6R's, come over and we'll do a demo on with some DVD-Audios on onboard vs Ht Omega. Shall we make it a friendly wager?

Unless you spent your youth at rock concerts, most people, given decent cans, can easily hear the difference between a good sound card and cheap one. With some cards they can't even drive headphones well at all if they're high-Z, above about 120 Ohm impedance.

I wouldn't necessarily call the typical $50 card cheap though, since Creative cards are the most popular you end up paying for gaming FX, bells and whistles as much as analog output quality.

However, there are some reasonably good cheap sound cards where the ideal is bypassing the last of the output stage and taking the DAC output straight to an external headphone amp, or if using speakers, put a quality preamp between that and the speaker amp.

Audiophiles though, before considering a $150 sound card might instead prefer an external USB DAC as getting the analog signal out of the relatively electrically noisy computer case does help clean up the background audible noise floor, especially with today's high current CPUs and video cards causing large ground current fluctuations as they go to/fro power managed and fuller loaded states.

Lastly, if using amp'd speakers the sensitivity of the amp input can make a big difference. Typical computer speakers with an integrated amp tend to hide lots of audio flaws due to the low quality of that amp. A $150 card paired with lower quality in the rest of the audio chain isn't going to reveal the difference as much, but you have to start somewhere if/when upgrading what you have.