My core is an older athlon64 on a asrock 939dualvsta mainboard, about 4gb ram and two 2tb samsung/seagate hdd. Right now I'm using a soundblaster audigy 2 zs with a coax spdif attached to it. This worked like a charm in windows..ac3 passthrough and such.
What I'm trying to do is get the sound through the spdif to my sony amplifier, so that I can watch movies. If I remember correctly from what l3mce told me, the audigy is not playing nice with linux because it doesn't report correctly.