Firstly dont be swayed by the THX spec... THX has been a laughable certification (except in the cinema standard) for consumer gear all along... Plus Creative own a large % of THX hence the certification
... IIRC THX spec used to be 2 rear speakers for the 6th matrix channel and yet this is a single speaker output... kind of makes a mockery of having a certification but thats just my feeling...
I suspect this will be good news for DVD-A in the market place though (god knows these high rez formats nead to break the chicken and egg of SW / HW adoption and the PC can do that)... Be aware that this card will lock you out of the digital output for DVD-A... You will need to be using that analogue out as the copy protection angle is preventing the ability of bit perfect copying...
After my last creative horror story I will et others adopt this card even though DVD-A has been one of my pet peeves for ages... I will stick to the DVD-V audio tracks on a DVD-A (24/96 rather than 24/192) with my current card for now I believe....
You are right also that SACD will take a much longer time (possibly never if Sony get thier way) to make it to the PC... I also predict that within 12 months of this release the MLP decoding will be hacked like CSS....
So Jim, With all this talk of an uber Media Jukebox, when are JRiver planning to build DVD ripping into the application... I am manually ripping DVD VOB's and using a group of tools for rip and playback....