Thanks! Got it.

I have owned a USB based Onkyo SE-U55 sound processor for a while (I was using the analog outputs in an office setting, which are not too great). But this thing also has digital outputs and I am now using those to feed the Harman/Kardon receiver in my living room. I mostly play MP3s. The specs of the Onkyo say it outputs 32, 44.1 and 48khz. My MP3's are all 44.1 khz. I just can't tell from the literature and web searches whether the Onkyo goes 44.1-48-44.1, or whether it spits out the unchanged orginal 44.1 of the decoded MP3s (is there an easy way to test?).

For a while I thought going for a better sound option to feed digital to my harman kardon would be a waste of money. But now I'm not sure. I need a USB or FireWire based sound processor since i amd using a laptop (no PCI slot).