Before I say anything further, I have now encountered this same question in at least three forums. Please don't do this. First of all, any responses you get don't have the benefit of all the respondees seeing the other responses. So you risk having two people answer your question with the same information (or, the same person answering you twice, if they don't recall already answering your question in the other forum), which is wasteful of somebody's time and energy. You also have to collect all the responses from the differnt places and reconcile them together. It's certainly easier if they are all strung out in a row in the same window than in three or more separate ones.
OK, now to your follow-up question, "but it doesn't give me good results through a mic. I just dont know if the 2496 is missing something that my current sound card has. Any thoughts on this?"
First off, how are you trying to record with a mic? Are you talking about the small plastic mic that comes with the computer, or a real microphone? If the former, that's a real weak link. You can plug that into a $4000 Apogee mic pre/analog-to-digital converter and it will still sound bad.
Now, even if you did have a reasonably OK mic plugged into the Crystal's mic input via some fancy cabling or adapters, the preamp circuit on this is bound to be inadequate. After all, it's meant to work with the cruddy litle plastic electret mics, not be used for professional recording.
The Audiophile won't help you at all in this regard because it has line level inputs only. You need a preamp to take the microphone's output level up to line level before you can even plug it into the soundcard. Many recordists use a mixer for this purpose; some just use a dedicated preamp.
Finally, if you have a decent mic, and a decent preamp. you can plug its line level output into the Audiophile and get absolutely smashing results if you know how to use a mic and how to adjust your recording levels...
