All photos taken with a Sony V3, resized and processed with either Gimpshop or Paint.net. 

Auzen’s X-Fi Prelude is indeed a different color.  It is dark chocolate brown.  And then there's the back of the board, which a lot of companies neglect.

It has more resemblance to the Fatal1ty branded X-Fi’s in terms of specifications than the rest of the X-Fi breed, with the exception that Fatal1ty’s LED is red, and the Prelude's green.

It is solid when its on, and blinks when its working. Very odd.  Much rather like a blue LED.

The X-Fi Prelude has significantly upgraded parts however, with the inclusion of AKM AK4396VF DAC’s for the output, and AKM AK5394AVS for digitizing duties.  These parts have a -120dB noise floor, which is extremely low.  Generally, the lower  noise of the digital parts translates into high fidelity for the rest of the card.  Or perhaps it is better to say, if you do hear some noise coming from your speakers, don’t go blaming the sound card.

The Analog to Digital (ADC) portion is for stereo, 2-channel input.

This is the highest performing chip on the market, in case you were wondering.

As I mentioned earlier, the op-amps on the front channels are replaceable, but the rest of them are soldered onto the board.  It has been mentioned elsewhere (go Rob!) that the National Semi op-amps are quite good anyway, so it's a wonder why you would want to.  I still want to try at some point, though.

The whole analog section looks like this:

That just about covers the hardware features for the X-Fi Prelude.  On to the drivers!