Hey all.

I'm in the market for a new audio card. I used to have a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro (what a name...) which died about a year ago. I've been using the on-board surround out on my motherboard, but aside from inferior audio quality, there are some driver issues which cause it to fart every once in a while (in games this causes lag) and generally I'm not too happy with it.

I would go out and buy a brand new X-Fi card from Creative, but for many reasons I'm not very happy with how they do business (if you're familiar with the Daniel_K story) and how they design their products.

Mainly what I'm missing with Creative cards (and this is a big deal) is the ability to recieve Dolby Digital and DTS signals through the optical in, and run them through the decoder to send the signal through the speakers. Put simply, I want to be able to play surround from my Xbox.

I have a custom-built amp which only accepts 6 analog inputs for 5.1 surround, and to get surround sound from external devices i need some sort of decoder. It gave me no end of frustration to know that while my sound card (the Audigy 2) had a dolby digital decoder, i was PREVENTED FROM USING IT because Creative or Microsoft deemed it unacceptable (for DRM reasons, is what I remember reading)

In any case, does anybody know of a card which can take an optical Dolby Digital/DTS stream and send the analog signal out to the speakers?

I'm not really concerned about budget. I don't mind paying around $200 for a good high quality sound card which can do what I want. This would solve so many problems for my set-up.

Thanks for your time.