I haven't poked around inside the Windows OS or the Wave system to see how it deals with DSP. The sound card, of course, should only be limited by the DAC. But I kicked this around with a couple of guys and some have said that the Windows OS limits the stream internally, at least in some versions. I'm hoping some will chime in and confirm or deny this and possibly give technical details. I know that Vista is different than previous versions, because I did a little bit of reading on it when I installed WTPro/ST device drivers on Vista. But I didn't study it in depth.