I don't think this is the case. I remember seeing something about 3D sound in the card settings, thinking "that's not going to work with my 2.1 speaker system,

I don't think this is the case. I remember seeing something about 3D sound in the card settings, thinking "that's not going to work with my 2.1 speaker system, must be just a useless gimmiky DSP" -- and never using it again. Most of my friends had the same experience. Later on, I got a new computer and a much better speakers, and spent some time getting digital output to work. I used my motherboard for that, because at this stage, I wanted soundcard to be just a simple, stupid data sender. No DSP, no "advanced 3D sound rendering" -- the ideal sound card takes data from input (DVD) and sends them to speakers, acting as a dumb data pipe. Same goes for "fancy CRT features" -- what is that exactly that CRTs can do that flat-screens can not? Other than duck hunt-style controllers, I don't think there is anything.