Creative Sound Blaster Live:

This card is very popular, and has its supporters and detractors.
        
       In many ways this seems like a nice card. Many people like it and several have written to me to say that its technical
       deficiencies are too subtle for most people to hear. However, I'm still putting the SBLive in the "bad digital cards" section, on
       the grounds that people reading this document are looking for the highest quality sound they can afford; and if you are
       reading this section, you are looking for digital inputs and outputs that do what they're supposed to: pass digital data
       un-altered. The SBLive cannot do this, and therefor it is unsuitable for a professional-quality system. 
       Now for some more background info. Creative Labs has released source code for a driver. It can be found at
       http://opensource.creative.com. Subsequently, there is both an ALSA driver released for this card, and, according to Juergen
       Kahrs, a driver by Alan Cox that will end up in the mainstream linux kernel 2.4 release. It features support for hardware
       mixing, a very cool feature which means that "...dozens of processes can open /dev/dsp and emit sound, each with its own
       sample rate. I tested this feature and was able to emit 8 sound simultaneously with 3 different sample rates being involved.
       The disadvantage seems to be that there is always a sample rate conversion...."

As for the hardware, the "full" version of the SB Live (priced around US $200) does have digital input and output. There is
       also a $100 version that does NOT have the digital in/out. Now, about those digital ins / outs... Forrest Cook reports:

"Almost all the reviews focus on their analog and effects capability, and gave it a very good rating. The few that
          looked at the digital I/O found it pretty bad."

For example, at http://www.pcavtech.com/soundcards/ct4620/index.htm it is stated that

"Tests of the digital input of this card have been pretty disturbing... the digital input still seems to get unneeded
          DSP processing and corrupts sound quality by adding fairly broad 1 dB high peaks around 4 kHz, 10-12 kHz, and
          16-20 Khz, with 44 kHz sampling. The digital output measures 1 dB down at 13.5 KHz, and -3dB at 17 khz, and
          -15 dB at 20 kHz. This is atypically bad performance for sound card digital I/O...." 
          And at http://www.maz-sound.com/sblive.html we read that "...the DSP runs fixed at 48 kHz, means every sound
          runs through the internal 8 point interpolation with 48 kHz ... digital 1:1 copies are impossible (the 48 kHz SPDIF
          frequency can't be changed to anything else either). ![This] means: the SB Live! is no replacement for a
          digital-only card or an EWS64 L/XL for instance..."