audiocard for 50-100$

Is there a reason that something like a uDAC would not suit your needs?  

The creative X-fi series is good enough.

Unless you are a gamer, would suggest the Xonar series over anything from Creative.  Apart from the bad drivers from creative (yeah, after two years of working drivers, they now give me BSOD every half-hour).  Xonar also use higher quality components than their equally priced Creative counterpart.

Would suggest Xonar D1 is you have a PCI slot free, otherwise, Xonar DX if you have a PCIe 1.0x slot free.

The new X-Fi titanium HD uses some improved componants over the Xonar top end cards but don't spec it as high as the Xonar Essense cards. Drivers have been huge issues with both soundcard companies. Both have been very very slow to release improved drivers. Sometimes having to wait as much as a year or  more for promised driver improvements.The last drivers I have used by either company were stable at doing normal consummer tasks such as listening to music, playing DVD's & such. Problems arrise from certain games & programs that require ASIO support for recording. ASIO does not work correctly on many recording programs so try before you buy any such program especially with Xonars ASIO support being the way it is.The only one for me that seemed to work semi correctly was Sony's Soundforge & that not totallycorrect but at least I got some good high rez recordings out of it.

I would gather though that the X-Fi titanium would be somewhat more colored than the Xonar Essense cards are especially after the coupling caps are removed from the Xonar cards, However doing the same with the X-Fi HD cards may have an even greater improvement than The Xonar cards if you remove the coupling caps & put wire in thier place as the Buffer amps appear to be a step up as is the DAC though a very very minor one in the DAC department