New Xonar Essence "One"

[MrToad]

which card(s)?

I've only ever had *one BSOD with a bad driver *install in XP64 with my X-Fi XM.. still have the card.. still working flawlessly, have done so in: XP32, XP64, Server03, W7 32 & 64 bit & WS08R2

Auzentech prelude:

It was OK in WinXP x64, when I moved to Win7 x64 DDLive started misbehaving. It would reset at random intervals (making a loud "tearing fabric" noise, followed by a prolonged silence)
Besides this SCP made it's appearance. That's without any hardware changes, just changing the OS.

X-Fi Ti Fatal1ty:

DDLive showed similar behaviour to the Prelude with DDLive, but in a completely different rig (the Prelude was in a Socket 775 rig, the X-Fi in a socket 1366 rig) which had no hardware in common.

After a a day or two the sound would start stuttering (mainly while playing games, but happened while just doing desktop use a couple of times too), then the rig would, within a couple of minutes, slow down to a crawl then freeze. No BSOD, no obvious clues in the logs.

Removed the X-Fi, problem went away.

Asus Xonar Essence STX and ST:

Horendous latency using DDLive. About 2-3 seconds.
After a completely uneventful session, switch off computer. Switch on again, sound card drivers can't load (complains the device manager).
Remove drivers and device from device manager, clean drivers, try to reinstall, although the card is detected and is in the device manager with the yellow question mark (and PNP ID is detected correctly), driver installer doesn't "see" the card, and refuses to install the driver.
So you keep rebooting and trying until it does. Or you reinstall Win7 and start all over again. Until the problem presents itself again.

These problems are not unique to myself a my hardware configuration. Of course if you google it you will find only posts by people experiencing the problem, not posts by happy customers with fully functional products.

But still, there's one too many of us.

Indeed all these cards had really positive reviews that not once mentioned driver issues at all.

EDIT:

My bottom line is:

a) If you want DDLive or DTSConnect, brace yourself. It might actually be worth to forget about it and buy a different receiver and use the analog outputs (and take advantage or the decent OpAmps some of these cards have).

b) Windows Vista/7 FUBARd the sound subsystem of the OS. Since the upgrade I've experience no benefits and a whole lot of irritation in this particular matter.