Good point Gary. You can get a decent recording and playback even using most of the cheap soundcards that come in today's computers.

The Audigy will add some to the quality of any digital recordings that you may wnat to do, along with the advantage of using ASIO drivers that will greatly reduce latency, but you can do ok without it. If latency becomes an issue, you could always employ the use of the freeware ASIO4All generic ASIO drivers, which pretty much will work with just about any XP system and soundcard. I've used that setup with my laptop ( as a sound module only, not for recording ) when both space and setup time was at a premium and I didn't want to bring my USB quattro external soundcare along.

If you're going to do any serious recording, mixing, and mastering, that's when you might need to consider a higher quality card. The Audigy is fine, but I doubt you'd ever see it in action in any pro studio.

AJ