Sadly, Even Sound Cards Are Suffering Price Boosts
You know you have plenty of empty PCIe slots in your system, and if you occasionally run into grounding issues with your microphone or the onboard audio doesn’t do surround properly then perhaps you should think about going back to a discrete sound card. Creative is still putting out new ones, such as the Sound Blaster AE-X. It can offer a bit rate up to 32-bit/384 kHz, with a rated 130 dB dynamic range. The ESS ES9039Q2M DAC also has support for DSD256 decoding, and ASIO 2.3 in addition to the normal offerings.
The dedicated headphone plug can handle impedance from 8 ohms up to 600 ohms so even high end headphones will appreciate the Sound Blaster AE-X. Put it all together and you have a modern sound card, not a nostalgic piece of hardware. Unfortunately while it launched at $150 it has crept up to just over $200. Sadly even the Sound Blaster AE-X suffers from the same price inflation as just about every other component.
