What happened?? (Sound Cards)

So I've been quite meticulous about benchmarks and specifications on Sound cards lately and I've narrowed my search down to two sound cards that fit my liking; The Auzentech X-Fi Forte and The Asus Xonar D2X. I'm leaning towards D2X, but due to prices, My hand are a little tied at the moment.

I'm well aware of their lack of drivers and such, but it really is all I can afford for the solution I'm trying to achieve with my Analog Z-5500 (I know there are better speakers out there, but this is all I could afford too. I've seen enough threads to know what goes on when these are mentioned, so don't even start on THAT subject, please.) or future upgrades.

Now, my specifications are only that the audio cards come with
1. PCI-E x1
2. 7.1 Analog Connectors (Without the extra cost of buying an expansion)
and
3. Under $150

Now, I've come to discomforting realization that Now that I know what I want.... How am I going to get it??

All these cards are virtually GONE. Almost every high-end Sound card is extinct and I'm wondering why. So, I did more research to find nothing but an article about a little thing called Soundcore 3D, which is supposedly some kind of successor to the X-Fi.
To be honest, I don't really care, but could this be the cause of the disappearance from other high-end cards?
Seriously, these cards have been out of stock for nearly 5 months. And those that are in-stock, I'm hesitant about buying due to the distant suspicion that they're the same price BECAUSE of their rarity.

.... Help -.- I don't have an issue playing the waiting game, but to hear NOTHING about it for quite a large amount of time gets me a tad irked.

The Asus Xonar D2X pops up on ebay quiet often, here is one:
EBAY LINKY

As well as the Auzentech X-Fi Forte, here:
EBAY LINKY

You can also find them on Amazon.com

Amazon search for DX2

Amazon search for X-Fi Forte

It doesn't quite answer my questioning as of why the manufacturers no longer carry them, but I much appreciate your help. I don't exactly favor ebay, but if it's the only way, thank you so much!

^^^
Probably mostly smaller markets due to onboard sound being improved (and thus lower demand), so the manufacturers are restricting to one or two major cards and dropping all the fluff cards. Also, most cards have similar features and chipsets now (outside of Creative, but they're still trying to cling to gaming performance in a world where that doesn't really matter anymore with Windows 7), so there's not as much need for bleeding edge hardware outside of recording interfaces, and those are largely moving to USB DACS or 1394 (in the case of digidesign/ProTools) devices. With those two cards in particular, most Auzentech cards seem to have vanished from retailers like Newegg, while with ASUS it looks like they've mainly replaced the card with the Essence cards. The drivers on the Essence STX would likely be improved compared to the D2X anyways:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829132010


The only real differences between soundcards at this point (above $100) would be inputs/outputs, drivers, and features like DTS/ASIO/etc. For gaming there's nothing to note, as most games are moving to OpenAL or Miles and processor usage (along with EAX) is a non-issue since everything is done at software level now, and modern CPUs barely blink at audio processing outside of DAW apps.

^^^ Very well said. Sound cards now are more or less a specialized tool. In the past, when you upgraded your sound card, what you heard was the new DSP being able to render more of the bit-stream as opposed to true audio quality. For instance, some of the early sound cards could only process 16 voices, then they gradually worked their way up to 32, 64, etc. The voices are the amount of sounds that can be played simultaneously, the more you have, the more realistic the effects. One of the big selling points of the X-Fi was its ability to handle 96 voices. Many people mistake the amount of voices they hear as audio quality, when in fact its audio quantity. This is inherently true for those who use computer speakers, which are very limited in their ability to reproduce quality sound. When you get to the more specialized cards, they have a niche market for music playback, recording, higher end headphone listening, and other things of that nature.

So they already took Desktop speakers as far as they can go?... In my case, I mean.

... So will I not notice a difference between a D2X or a Forte?
All I do is game and listen to music, really...

aaa12585 said:

So they already took Desktop speakers as far as they can go?... In my case, I mean.

... So will I not notice a difference between a D2X or a Forte?
All I do is game and listen to music, really...

Click to expand...

Honestly I stopped using my Fatality X-Fi card when I started slapping more and more GPUs in my setup, eventually there wasn't any room for one. I use the logitech z5500's and I don't notice any difference at all, I think we've come to the point where onboard sound cards are just as good as the old X-fi's, in practical situations like gaming and music that is.

aaa12585 said:

... So will I not notice a difference between a D2X or a Forte?
All I do is game and listen to music, really...

Click to expand...

Probably not, but you might have better results with an external DAC depending on your speaker setup, or if you're outputting to a digital receiver there may not be any difference sending it via the onboard if it has SPDIF/optical out.

aaa12585 said:

So they already took Desktop speakers as far as they can go?... In my case, I mean.

Click to expand...

That's a confusing question.
And no.
In the end, it comes down to this: PC speakers are worse than bookshelfs of the same price. PC speakers are designed to make money. Bookshelfs (from an actual speaker manufacturer) are usually a balance between making money and sounding decent.

I'm not trying to offend. I had a Z506, which is the grandfather of the Z5500.

With the advent of the internet and more people going on forums like this, folks have figured out that you can take the same $ that it costs for a 'high end' pc speaker set, and get a little receiver/amp and a pair of bookshelfs and have better sound. That fact, combined with the increasing quality of onboard audio, and the non-discerning ear of the average listener, has pretty well killed the soundcard.

In most usage scenarios it is best to just use the SPDIF out from your mobo.

As far as a soundcard that you could get, most of which are also extinct due to the reasons mentioned above, you do still have a lot of choices from Auzentech for example which you can order form their website. The Asus D2X is good if you can find it. Xfi cards by Auzen are good, although I like the CMI chips better. You would probably appreciate the more punchy dynamic range of the Xfi chip on proper circuitry, ie from an Auzen Xfi prelude type card, over the more delicate mids/highs of a CMI8788 on the Z5500 since it's a driver only system geared at dynamic range and bass, which is what the Xfi does well.

I have 2 Xonars, a D2PM and a STX. Both are good. They lack warmth and depth but have excellent, low noise floors and great seperation and definition.
Auzen does better things with the CMI8788 than ASUS for less $ (Meridian line) but those are out of stock and PCI only.