Moth3r said:

The 44056Hz rate was also mentioned here; I'm leaning towards the "load of old poo" answer.

Thanks for clarifying. A load of old poo it is then :)

I was under the impression that some audio cards could not resample a digital input in realtime. I could be wrong, I haven't captured many PCM streams to my PC. If the card can do it then fine - but I would still compare the results against a software upsample.

Isnt that exactly the opposite of what D.Carroll was saying?

D. Carroll said

Sound cards that have codecs (coder/decoder) that conform to the AC97
spec will resample all audio to 48kHz.

Maybe the AC97 chip/codec just doesn't do a very good job of the resample in real time. Probably safer to stick to what everyone is recommending and capture 44.1K and resample in s/w.

I've heard that DTS is actually easier - no demodulator required, for a start.

Sweet. Might just give this a go then just to see how that works.

Many thanks for the advice Moth3r, you've filled in a lot of the blanks :)