I just got my new sound card from South Korea today. Bought it new off eBay which was direct off the manufacturer. I was one of the lucky few to get in on the trial they were doing on eBay before they started selling for the worldwide market. I ordered it last Saturday night and it arrived on Thursday. Pretty awesome delivery time if you ask me (3.5 business days). I was expecting it to be about 2 weeks at least.
The card is a HDA Digital X Mystique 7.1 Gold made by HiTec Digital Audio in Korea.
I paid $85 + $25 USD postage = $153 NZD for it and no tax as I asked the seller to tick the 'gift' box on the customs form. ;) I bought this card because my amplifier doesn't have 6 channel analogue RCA inputs that you would normally use to get 5.1 sound. If you use the digital out on the Audigy 2 ZS it just outputs 2 channel audio unless it's a DVD in which case it does Dolby Digital or DTS.
Anyway the card uses a Dolby Digital Live Real-Time Contents Encoder based on the C-Media CMI8768/PCI-8ch+ PCI chipset which uses this technology (.pdf). So basically very similiar to Soundstorm, it can do EAX 2.0 and outputs everything to Dolby Digital 5.1 sound through the optical or coax ports on the back of the card. It is supposed to be hardware based but it does use some CPU cycles for driver functions. Can't say I've noticed much difference in HL2 on my P4 with hyper-threading and X800 XT PE.
I'm outputting the audio through the sound card's coaxial out directly to my amplifier's coaxial in with a fairly decent RCA -> RCA cable that came with my video card. The cable is twice as thick as the ones you get from DSE so it must be a bit better. :-) The speaker system I am using to test the card with is a Pioneer HTD8 home theatre system and also Sennheiser 515 headphones:
After a few months of usage I can still say this is the best sound card I've ever used. I have tried it with some music, and it sounds absolutely awesome, definitely better than my Audigy 2 ZS. Half Life 2, Counter-Strike Source and Doom 3 are especially good because they were made for use with Soundstorm. I get full discrete sound coming out of each speaker in 5.1 surround. It's just like being right in the action, you can hear where people are and where the action is, bullets whizzing past you, big boom of the rifles etc. Far Cry, other games and DVDs also work very well. For DVDs I use WinDVD and set it to passthrough mode so the amplifier will decode the Dolby Digital and DTS. 2 channel DivX/Xvid videos also work well in full 5.1 DD surround sound.
For best use you have to set up the windows speaker settings to 5.1 speakers. This will help the games play full 5.1 properly.
There are apparently a few driver issues to be fixed, but support seems to be good with an ASIO driver coming in the next few months and a beta driver for XP64 already available.
Overall I think it was a worthwhile purchase for me and I can recommend it to anyone who used to love Soundstorm or has a digital receiver they can use. The quality of this card is amazing and comes with a very cheap price tag for what you're getting. I have now sold my Audigy 2 ZS to offset the cost. :-)
Score: 9.5 / 10