[Ctritical Bill]

Until recently I have been using a Xonar D2 PCI and am very pleased with the excellent sound quality. However, now that I have upgraded my motherboard to a DFI X58 and I get the 'channel swapping problem' that appears to afflict all versions of this card. Asus have a fix for the problem on the PCI-E cards that updates the fimware on the PLX bridge chip but my PCI card doesn't have a PLX chip of course. I have little hope of Asus fixing this problem for the PCI cards as they obviously know about it but I guess the problem is beyond a driver fix.

Anyway, I need an alternative, and I have an Auzentech X-Mystique gathering dust. It doesn't sound as good as the Asus but I was wondering if I could get close, sound quality wise, by upgrading the opamps to the LM4562 as used in the Asus. The X-Mystique doesn't have a discrete DAC so I assume the digital conversion is done in the main Cmedia chip so I am wondering how much difference this will make.

So, do you think I could get similar sound quality on the X-Mystique by simply upgrading the opamps or will I have to buy a new soundcard ?
I am only interested in playing movies and I connect to my receiver using the analog outputs.

 

[Currawong]

You can probably get LM4562 samples for nothing, so it's worth a try upgrading them. I don't know what the defaults are, but depending on your headphones, there'll be a significant difference usually.

 

[Ctritical Bill]

The opamps that came with it are the ubiquitous S4580 .
I think the shipping costs for samples from National.com will be greater than just buying them from a local supplier.
I am not using headphones but outputting 5.1 analog channels to my receiver.
I am wondering which part of the sound card has the greatest effect on simple analog output - the audio chip, DAC, or opamps.