I would HIGHLY recommend this card to anybody. I leave hardware acceleration enabled but disable all other sound options and let DDL do its thing. Other things I have noticed are when in game - I have disable EAX support for the sound to be encoded properly. Turtlebeach has said this will be fixed in their next driver release. As soon as you open the control panel the sound works properly until your next reboot. So if you reboot your computer you will have 0 sounds until you open the Montego control panel.

When you use the optical output the volume doesnt track properly. There are software glitches with the current drivers. I am still trying out different games with the DDL feature.

I can say that on my system the performance hit is none. If you do some digging this option is actually done at the software level and not on the hardware itself. Everything else gets encoded to Dolby Digital on the fly. It has true digital pass-thru so your DVD movies get passed to your digital decoder unchanged so you hear the DVD as it is supposed to be heard. The DDL option is awesome - I still can't believe that Creative would launch the x-fi line and not include this feature. The DDL card has an air sound quality - it sounds very spatial whereas my ZS sounded boomy bass I guess is how I would describe it. The sound difference is very noticeable compared to a ZS. The reason I switched was for the optical out on the DDL card and my z5500 speakers are digital. My previous card was the SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS. There arent many opinions on this particular soundcard so I thought I would share mine.

Turtle beach montego ddl gq968