Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1e X-Fi Audio - Price: $140USD on eBay store

What we have here today is a new kind of Prodigy, the latest in a long line of Audiotrak’s Prodigy series. 

Unlike most of Audiotrak's products, this Prodigy is not geared towards the home recording studio, but aimed squarely at the gamer-slash-audiophile.  The Prodigy has a few interesting features, such as sporting an X-Fi audio chip and PCI-Express, to make it worth a look.  It also has replaceable OPAMPS and you've probably heard by now, a dedicated headphone output to handle those indignant and expensive audiophile headphones.  More on that later.

However, we’re starting to see more and more sound cards with Creative’s chips in them, which is an interesting direction for Creative. 

They used to lock their chips to their own cards, but due to excellent competition from ASUS they have very little choice but to open their portfolio.  The good news is that just about every sound card I've seen with Creative chips have been exceptional, and the Prodigy is no exception.

And here we are, with a fine X-Fi branded card from Audiotrak, the Prodigy 7.1e.  The new Prodigy 7.1e promises high-fidelity with high-performance AKM 24-bit/96 KHz digital-to-analog converters, a separate headphone amplifier, optical digital I/O with AC3/DTS pass-through, exchangeable opamps, and of course, Creative’s PCI-e X-Fi chipset.

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