Well, I got my Juli@, (hardly) used, for about 50€ or so last year (or even the year before?). It's the PCI version though, as I had 3 slots to spare. I bet the PCIe one is much the same wth a bridge chip.
Never got to do much with it though, as the current ("unified") Windows drivers suck so much it would make a black hole proud. There officially is no power management support, like at all. Enter hibernation once, and the card no longer says a peep - too bad I do this every day. Good for you if you're still on XP and can use ye olde v1.21 driver - I never had such issues with the Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 drivers.
The best hardware is good for nought if there is no appropriate driver support to back it up. This has been the downfall of many a good card in the past.
I'm on a $30 Audigy FX these days. The drivers are not without their quirks but they generally work, and the thing sounds good subjectively, measures decently (better on the D/A side) and with an output resistance of 22 ohms and enough "oomph" (2 Vrms, front out) is fine for driving my trusty HD580s barefoot. That's the card with the ALC898.
Not sure what a good inexpensive card for recording would be nowadays. Unbalanced input, maybe Xonar D2/D2X, slightly noisier 44.1 kHz aside.
IMO you can get transparent playback quality for very little money these days if all that you need is a line-level output. Even eBay DAC PCBs of questionable construction quality tend to be quite good enough even if they measure way short of their DAC IC specs. A certain SMSL DAC has been found to clip way below fullscale though.
Jumper from the Hanrun transformer
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
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