But if you are looking at building an audio rig, you'd never get a Soundblaster. My personal preference is Focusrite. No fuss, almost no latency (5 ms), plus built-in mic preamps.

Valid garbage or random perl?

I'll buy that for a dollar :D

You are so right. :) New standards are usually so hard to adopt because we usually have to wait for Microsoft to invent their own version of the same paradigm and then we have to make exceptions in our HTML/code.