I personally own a Echo miaMIDI card for spdif and it is extremely easy to install. All i had to do was uninstall my creative card and remove the software for it. The install the Echo software, shut down the pc. Remove the creative card, pop in the echo card and start the pc back up. Just followed the menu's from there when they popped up (regarding finding drivers and the such) and was done in a matter of minutes. The echo card is a big step up in terms of playback compared to the Creative card (audigy 2 by the way). S/pdif is also pretty easy at getting to sync up with the console3 program. Too bad the card lacks optical in/outs.