I recently upgraded to vista 64. It's great, because I can have 8gb of RAM available, but horrible...because my M-audio card no longer works . I'm wanting a bit-perfect, 24/96 s/pdif output that I can send to my studio monitors, which only accept coaxial s/pdif. I could even do without any other I/O, DTS, AC3, or any multichannel capabilities; if I had bit-perfect stereo, I would be happy.

I've dug around on the m-audio site quite a bit. The main soundcards that seem to come up in the forums are the M-audio soundcards and the chaintech soundcard. From what I can tell, M-audio has nothing to do with vista 64 at the moment. The chaintech soundcard outputs at 96kHz, but won't output at 24 bit.

From what I've heard, the creative soundcards all undesireably resample to 48kHz internally. Other soundcards I have found that do support vista64 merely have beta drivers out.

After pulling my head out of my ***, I realized that I do have an onboard Realtek ALC888 chip in my IP35-E motherboard, and I have read appealing reviews about that chipset's s/pdif capabilities . Its s/pdif is toslink only, but I should still be able to solve that problem with $50 or less with a Co2 converter from m-audio. (Are there any specific drivers that I need in order to get this ALC888 chip to work best?)

Is this the best solution, or did I overlook something?

Many thanks for any input!
-Ryan