New sound, we hope

A few months ago, the onboard audio on my Gigabyte motherboard suffered what I can only describe as an unrecoverable, electrical anomaly. Once that happened, the soundcard portions of the motherboard were unresponsive - no detection in windows, no reinstallation of drivers, etc...

As a temporary fix, I had to install an Audigy 2 PCI card. This was capable of handling routine audio (playback and dj duties), but I was getting a lot of distortion trying to stream my drumkit live through this method.

Fast-forward to today: NewEgg has a special on the Creative X-Fi Titanium PCI-Express card.

Of course, I was in the market, but I also needed to do some research, quickly...it has drivers for Windows 7 - 64-bit, it's got 96kHz sampling, user-selectable parameters, HDMI pinouts, and some optical interfaces. The PCI-Express bus will offload audio processing to the dedicated Creative hardware, hopefully lowering latency further. Apparently, no one else has been insane enough to specifically stream live drums through the X-Fi Titanium - but we can't have it all now, can we?

The card usually retails for $99. Using the promo code, EMCYRYW45, and sending in a $25 rebate, the final cost is $49.99 delivered tax-free. This promotion ends on 4/14.