Ah, I see. Sorry about the confusion, which is my fault. Let's see if I can explain this mess. When I said I've been using ASIO for over a year I meant with other cards besides the Chaintech--namely the Revolution and for the last few months the EWX 2496 and Audiophile (although the Audiophile is somewhate buggy with ASIO on my computer). With these cards ASIO has worked fine and has done it's job of cleaning up the sound.
Now to the Chaintech are you sure it's not possible to use ASIO with it? It seems to work with me but I have to set it up differently. The real reason I started doing this was just so I could use the Chaintech and the Revolution without my software thinking they're the same card--which can happen under a few settings. On some settings the option to use the Chaintech (Envy24) doesn't appear, only the option to use the Revo does. One of these situations is with the use of the ASIO drivers. These drivers I got from that one sight with the Japanese text (
http://www3.cypress.ne.jp/otachan/) and the dll version of ASIO from this site works fine on my computer (although the exe version will not). Anyway under this dll version of ASIO with most cards I can just pick the card I want to use and everything will work perfectly. But finding that my Chaintech wasn't recognized under this ASIO driver I decided to try these ASIO4ALL drivers that everyone has been talking about. Bingo, the Chaintech is recognized under these drivers (although the Audiophile is not, for some reason) but there is still one problem and I can use ASIO4ALL only by selecting it within the dll version of the other ASIO driver in Foobar. So, essentially, with my Chaintech I have ASIO4ALL piggybacking through the other ASIO drivers which would mean, according to Glassman's input I'm using Kernal streaming via ASIO. Is this the way it's normally done? It just seems weird that I have to use my other ASIO driver in order to use ASIO4ALL.
Whether it's normal or not it works and I can use ASIO4ALL via my other ASIO drivers to improve the clarity of the sound with my Chaintech. I've done A/B testing and I can confirm that the sound is cleaner going through ASIO4ALL-->ASIO (dll version) than from directsound. The difference in the clarity of the sound is quite obvious just as it is with all of my other soundcards routed directly through the ASIO driver.
Now, another question is, if ASIO is independant of the OS used why do many people say that it cannot be used with Windows ME? Thus far it works fine with me.