Sound Card Question – Again

I know we had this discussion a while back, but I was wondering if anyone has any concrete evidence on the subject.  I want a sound card that can do both spdif and analog at the same time.  But I don’t know which cards, if any, will do it.  I also can’t remember if the OS is a limiting factor; seems like I’ve read that it can’t be done in Vista.  But as I say that, I’ve read where X-Fi owners have said that their cards would output from analog and SPDIF at the same time, even in Vista.  So I’m totally confused.  Right now I’m using 2 sound cards; I’m using the onboard audio and an Envy 24 card.  The onboard is set as the default so that when I play bluray with PDVD Ultra, it will output 5.1 sound from the analogs.  With the Envy 24, I have it set as the audio renderer within SageTV.  This way I can use SPDIF for music, TV, DVD, and all other video.  It works pretty good and just as I had hoped.  But it is not without issues.  For some reason, the sound in SageTV works well for the digital channels and DVD, but sometimes if I try to play a music file or watch analog TV (from satellite) through Sage, it will play without audio.  If I stop the song or TV show, and then restart it, it will play fine from then on.  It doesn’t cause confusion for me, but if the wife had this problem she wouldn’t know what to do.  I think it is related to the 2 sound card issue, because I never had this problem before the change.  Another small problem is playing CDs.  I don’t play CDs very often, but once my wife bought a new CD and wanted to listen to it when we got home.  No matter what I played it in, it would play in a 6 channel stereo effect since Windows had to be set at “5.1” (and SageTV won’t play CDs so I couldn’t get it to play through SPDIF).  I know I could’ve ripped it and then played with Sage, but I didn’t want to go through that at the time; the same thing with our Christmas CDs during the holidays.

So I have some evidence that it works with X-Fi cards, but there’s so many variations, which ones?  Then there are other “higher end” cards like Auzentech and ASUS; do they do it?  I may do some switching around come spring and move my 780G board from my main PC to my HTPC so I want to try to get everything working more efficiently and take that time to work on some of the problems that I have.  I’m going to be years away from using HDMI since my TV only has component and my receiver only has spdif and multichannel in.  I’m not opposed to using analogs for everything, but I don’t know an easy way to do that either.  All analog TV (live and recorded) and divx files I use DTS Cinema mode on my receiver.  So how could I get AC3 Filter to decode DD for HDTV and apply something like Pro Logic II to other stuff?