My Dell desktop (about a year old) has 8ch Realtek sound built in, and it came with Vista64. Anyway, I noticed that Vista allows you to set the common sample rate and quantization for your soundcard in the shared mode, based on it's capabilities. The Realtek allowed up to 192KHz/24bit I was skeptical, so I generated an ultrasound tone sweep at 192K, and found that the output level quickly crashed a little above 20KHz. I wasn't too suprised, because so much of this numbers stuff is just a marketing gimmick anyway.
Recently, I thought I'd give it another go in Win7... I was able to play AND record back tone sweeps in excess of 80KHz! In the 8ch playback mode, the phase alignment was within a few degrees across all channels. I'm not sure whether it's a difference in OS, or the driver that came with 7. Either way, I have a monster Kenwood amp capable of 250W/ch with a bandwitdth of a few hundred KHz. All I need is for James to hook me up with some serious super tweeters so I can nuke all the bats, rodents and insects in the neighborhood.
Actually, I'm curious as to whether a PCAOM could work in this frequency range- it could make for some real HD photo color rendering.
