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I *seem* to have gotten the Delta Dio 2496 working under Windows 2000 & MAD at 24bit with the NT drivers 4.1.17.13. The thing is I'm not sure if it is at 24bit because switching between 24bit & 8 bit, I can't really hear a difference.

Turn off Mad's dithering. There should be a obvious difference between undithered 8-bit and 24bit. Mad's dithering is quite good, *dithered* 8-bit sounds remarkably clean. If you can't hear a difference, reply back to the list.

Moreover, I tried to play a 24bit 96Hz wav file on winamp & it crashed the whole system, this problem is repeatable every time.

Sounds like your driver is having some issues. I had to put my 24 bit soundcard in a windows 98 box, because of driver issues like this.

I recorded digitally to a Minidisc & the minidisc was able to record fine which leads me to suspect that it is still at 16bit because the minidisc has a 16bt DAC only. (maybe I'm wrong here?) Is there any way to check if the output is at 24bit?

Your Minidisc may be truncating the 24bit words to 16bit. Also, it could be skipping every other sample, reducing the signal to 16/48. Does your sound driver have a utility that indicates what the output is at?

1 more thing, I'm reluctant to try the wrapper posted here because under the WDM drivers my audio playback keeps having pops & clicks. I've tried almost every trick in the book, disable hardware acceleration to no avail. but right now under the NT drivers, at least there is no pops & clicks! But is it 24bit? thanks for helping.

Are you getting the pops & clicks on the analog output of your soundcard, or on a recording to the mini disc off of your digital outputs?

John