hmmmmm .. with 99.9% of the MOBOs in the market offering built in sound cards some with high quality sound cards, what does this say to the independent sound card makers such as Creative. Right now we see only creative. no one is competing with them. And when last the last time creative launched its new sound card?

i am using a hercules digifire 7.1 card. but this people never update the driver. I think other than creative, sound card producers dont update their drivers. I am planning to the the older Revolution 5.1/7.1 M-Audio cards but the drivers are from 2003 for the 7.1 card and 2004 for the 5.1 card

^ really ? I know relatively, a PCI SC beat the onboard cards but some MOBO are embeding 'high quality' onboard SC. And we know that GPU is going to stay because we see more and more players entering the market. Previously we see only Asus, Saphire, N-Vidia, ATI, MSI, Winfast, Gigabyte then we saw Powercolor, Galaxy, colourful and few other with chinese character on the box. This is a sign that GPU is going strong. Looking at SC, i see only creative. Check the price lists at Low Yat - we see only Creative cards. with only 3-4 shops selling 1-3 cards of other brand. Is this not the sign that SC is dying ?