i havent used the Riviera 5.1 myself, but i did purchase a Turtle Beach Montego DDL for $79 + tax a few months back to replace my Audigy 2 ZS, (the montego ddl uses the exact same chipset as the X-Mystique too) ive been very happy with the upgrade ever since, with it hooked up to my receiver via optical out, all the channels are independantly controlled, and you can use all your receivers normal effects with it, instead of only being matrixed surround via 2 channel PCM encoding (such as with dolby surround or dts: neo)... and although DDL is a compressed format, there is no noticable or audible loss in sound quality, over a strictly analog connection, other people may argue and try to point out otherwise, but i havent noticed anything but an improvement... complete analog interconnects and interfacing for 5.1 surround, while listening to DVD-Audio discs on my DVD-Audio player does sound different, and honestly better as ive found in 24/192 quality... but anything really less than 24 bit (commerial audio cds are only 16 bit, along with most DVD-video discs), there isnt gonna be much of a real difference at all, analog or digital... therefore, i would say that Dolby Digital Live encoding is definetly the way to go, if you have a receiver 5.1 or better... sorry about the tangent, thats just been my experiences with my Turtle Beach card, and how i dont regret or look back to my Audigy 2 at all, for any kind of improvement
also, if something is already encoded in Dolby Digital (ac-3), the sound card will just be bypassed, because the audio stream is already encoded in dolby digital
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