APpologies for posting twice, but I have a feeling I'll get a better response here as it's a hardware forum. I'm looking for a sound card that comes as colse as possible to creating the authentic sound intended to be heard from music on CD (lossless of course) or DVD movies. What is desireable ot me is:
-the cleanest signal path as possible (so no up-and-downsampling from 44.1 KHZ, thx lolz)
-24-bit output and either 96 or 192KHZ samplerate
-The lowest noise floor and best signal-to-noise ratio possible

What I am not interested in:
-gaming
-surround sound (though I might get one in teh future, I dont' have one now)
-equalizers that think they know what I can't hear
-annoying background processes that get in the way and unnecessarily steal CPU cycles
I'm not a brand whore, so I don't care if it's Creative or not. Honestly, I am suspicious of anything that is as popular as--for example, teh X-Fi is, especially sense it seems to be tilted more towards gamers anyway.

If someone could help out on this, I woudl really appreciate it.

In order to not get a confusing mess, I suggest to stick to one thread...
I'll answer the question in your other topic: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=47497

The following statements of yours seem to contradict each other:

"I'm looking for a sound card that comes as colse as possible to creating the authentic sound intended to be heard from music on CD"

"-the cleanest signal path as possible (so no up-and-downsampling from 44.1 KHZ, thx lolz)"

"-24-bit output and either 96 or 192KHZ samplerate"

CD audio is 16-bit and has a sample rate of 44100Hz. The third quote contradicts your earlier stated desire for no resampling or changing of bit depth.

Well, if he desires only "24-bit output and either 96 or 192KHZ samplerate", he cannot avoid "up-and-downsampling from 44.1 KHZ" when playing CD audio. Of course, if he refers to that simply as an upper quality limit, he may well be able to achieve "the cleanest signal path as possible". Either way, I'm getting confused, so I'll leave it at that.

I'm reasonably sure there are cards around that that support such bit depths and sample rates without having to resample at all.

I would just get a soundcard with good specs and connections first of all, then worry about whether to resample. For a limited budget E-MU cards are very good. Above that some people recommend Lynx or R-ME. Using a high sample rate should give you the most control, but that is limited by software and whether sound cards' DACs and filters do a good job at 44khz I don't know.

Now as for how to get the intended sound from a CD, I am not sure about that.

Does anyone know how encoding works from an analog wave to a digital signal with a certain sample rate? (Assume infinite bit depth to simplify things.) And is there a canonical way to get from the digital signal to an analog wave?

Of course in practice people use various methods that shouldn't sound too different, something like different sorts of interpolation. (Not quite interpolation I suppose since there is no reason why the digital samples should correspond exactly to the analog samples at the intervals of the sample rate; that depends on the answers to the questions above.)

Curious to know the answer since mathematically the questions seem quite interesting.

Ah--sorry about the confusion. What I meant was that the card should be CAPABLE of these samplerates and bit depth. I want 16-bit 44.1 KHZ CDs to SOUND like 16-bit 44.1KHZ CDs, but I also want HDCDs to sound like 20 bits and DVD-Audio to sound like 24-bit 96 KHZ DVD-audio.

20 bit HDCDs should be okay if padded to 24 bit, I think.

http://www.dspguide.com/ch3.htm may answer that. And, here's for some discussion related to "the sound of CD", and "the sound of DVD", which shouldn't be very different...: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=40134