Soundcard digital pathways?, If you skip the DAC are they 'perfect'? Options

[puntloos]

I was wondering,

If you use a soundcard's digital out and tell it not to equalize/eax/otherprocessing, is the digital quality 'perfect'?

Case in point I have a professional DSP hooked up to my SB audigy's digital out. If I were to upgrade the audigy (not that I have the $$$ but for argument's sake ), would I get any improvement in the sound quality of my mpc audio playback?

Basically I hear some 'stories' from people that say 'yes' to the last question but I find it hard to believe that the digital ".wav" data from winamp would get distorted by the sound card that's hooked up to it. provided of course I don't use the onboard DAC's or some hardware DSP feature like resampling or spatialisation crap, but Im telling my computer to have all EQ's off and just play back the file.

Anyone know the answer here?

[Patsoe]

I am somewhat confused now - Pio said that Hercules do resample. So, my Fortissimo 4 resamples? Some people on these forums told me that this specific card does not resample. Also, the driver allows me to set the output frequency (44.1, 48, 96 and 192) - if I set it to 44.1, does this mean that the card still resamples?

Are you referring to this?

You can rule out all soundcards by Creative, Turtle beach, or Hercules (exept maybe used with ASIO support, like jrbamford says). The 24/96 soundcards by M-Audio and Terratec support perfect digital playback in Windows 98/me. Not sure about 2000.

That was in 2003, there was no Fortissimo4 back then