hrahn, thanks!

well i do trust xbit in their sound reviews... and i read a nice review some months ago comparing some new version of the asus xonar with other sound cards, and they did both rightmark tests as well as subjective tests with 5 people iirc, and then added something like 3/5 preferred X and said it delivers a more clear sound etc etc. unfortunately i dont remember what site this review was on and havent been able to find it again :/

i totally agree, even if your solution does well in the lab, it doesnt mean your customers will actually like it. while labs might complain about overblown and distorted base sounds, that might exactly be what the customers like...

Anyways, thanks a lot for the suggestions, ill check if xbit or some other decent audio review site can check out how good of a job our engineers did

and yes, when i worked for cellshock my office/lab building was right next to Oelbach, so i DO know how much money you can make with high end audio and video (HDMI) cables

If you want to make a good sound card which appeals both to gamers and music lovers, you seem to be on the right track.
Please consider only using solid capacitors with very tight specs on this card.
Considering the EAX software route, you seem to have found a great way of adding features without adding cost. Normally, I recommend doing everything in hardware (i am an efficiency junkie), but these days, with quad cores starting at just over 100€ a piece, I think it´s reasonable to offload some stuff onto the CPU.
thanks again
and yes, looking at how many cores people have idling is just nuts, using 5% of one of those idle cores really wont hurt. and since the lkatest games still dont use all cores completely, we should only see a single fps or so lost due to the cpu spending some few cycles on the audio, probabaly not even that

about the caps, all i know is that we use ultra low ESR caps... whatever that means :P