""Parts left off cost nothing and cause no service problems"" -Henry Ford

Have you looked at the M-Audio Audiophile 2496? I use it for transferring vinyl to digital and I'm very pleased with the results. I don't think there are drivers for Vista though.

The specs sound pretty good.. What's the signal/noise ratio? And the dynamic range?

http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news...ound+card.html

Hmm.. If you buy something you don't like then it's no loss? Good thing it ain't your money.

To the OP, Did you take the distortion test I pointed you to? If so, what were your results?

A bit "eccentric" eh? More like full on bat guano crazy.. Communication breakdown, Its always the same, I'm having a nervous breakdown, Drive me insane! To the OP, be careful dude. That 350Z ain't no Toyota Corolla. As the former owner of many high performance cars from a '62...

My take on things is somewhat different than many here. Do you think someone's first car should be a 350Z? Do you think that a new driver could properly appreciate such a car? Developing an "ear" as an audiophile is not an instantaneous process, it takes time and practice to hear the...

Make absolutely sure that your power supply has sufficient amperage to run your mobo. I've smoked a mobo before from not having enough amperage capacity in the power supply. If you're going to run Vista, get plenty of ram, Vista is a memory hog and also wants a fairly power processor to run...

Probably not a whole lot smaller. Six channels of heavy duty amplification take up some room, if only for the heatsinks.

Check out this Harman Kardon receiver.. http://www.amazon.com/Kardon-AVR-140...898368&sr=8-33

Headphone adapters from 1/4 to 3.5mm are readily available and very cheap. Your mobo has 7.1 built in so that shouldn't be a problem. The 1212 has excellent specs on the analog outs, 120 db of dynamic range an 20hz to 20khz +/- .05 db. It also has both coaxial and optical ins and outs...

You may wish to try the AndrewLabs plugin for WinAmp. It is slightly more adjustable than the Dolby Headphone plugin http://www.andrewlabs.com/

Quote: Originally Posted by nadavnaz How'd it compete with creative products (x-fi at different prices, when I said not overpriced I didn't necessarily mean under 100$... I'm not that limited. for my cause? (Which would be better for line in/spdif recording and which would eventually...

For a starter setup how about a Turtle Beach Montego? It has everything you asked for and can be had for fairly cheap. Look it over and get the specs here: http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/.../indetail.aspx You can get Vista drivers from the Turtle Beach website. Buy it here...

Adding a second sub is just a question of adding another 3.5mm Y adapter and another 3.5mm to RCA plug cable.

""Edit - I misunderstood you. You're saying to just plug the y-adapter into the front left/front right slot and then plug the other 2 cables into the y-adapter from there and run 1 to the speakers and 1 to the sub."" That is correct..

The Aego looks like a decent system and that is a good price. But I seriously doubt that it will be "room filling" any more than the systems I have come up with. The sub looks like it is probably a bandpass unit, those have some issues with flatness of response sometimes.

The mobo optical out should be fine, but I suspect that others here are going to disagree with me.

The main difference seems to be that the AV40 has a ferrofluid cooled silk dome tweeter (the website gives both 3/4" and 1" measure depending on which portion you look at) while the DX4 has a 1" mylar cone driver. My personal preference is for dome tweeters but I'm not sure that it really...

You will need one like this: http://www.amazon.com/RCA-3-5mm-Y-Ad.../dp/B00021ELDY And two like this: http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-Pro-Aud...0673171&sr=1-1 I checked your sound card and these will fit just fine, you plug the 3.5mm Y cable into the sound card and then plug each of the...

The Aego speakers look like they are probably very nice but the specifications given are woefully inadequate. The dimensions and the weight are given and that's about it. As far as doing research, there are just so *many* choices out there that you eventually get buried in the overwhelming...

No, the Yamaha's are among the cheapest subs around for the power, I'm really amazed that they managed to produce a sub with that technology at that price. I think what they do is read the sub motion from the voltage given off by the voice coil as it moves (its a generator too as well as a...

Doubling the output power on a sub only increases the perceived just a little. It actually takes ten times the power to get a doubling of perceived volume due to the fact that the ear is not a linear device but really responds logarithmically to sound levels. As I said in in the OP, the...

They're big, but they only have a 5" woofer. That's not going to compete with a dedicated 8" or 10" sub with 70 watts or more behind it. Also the Yamaha subs have a servo control technology that makes the bass tighter and more accurate. The Swans go down to 58 Hz while the dx4 is down...