Could this motherboard beat the empeg in quality?

Any audiophiles want to offer an opinion if the sound coming out of the new AOpen AX4B-533 Tube (with tupe amplification) would beat the sound quality of the empeg?
Spec are here Could this be THE motherboard to make a DIY car mp3 player (assuming you didn't have a empeg and didn't want to pay $800 for one)?

My initial thoughts are "ac97? So you're taking clean 44.1kHz audio and upsampling it to 48kHz before output... then caring about the components after the DAC?!!"

It would appear to be a gimmick for people who don't already have enough fans within their PC cases!

Hugo

I am no PC audio snob, so I use AC97 audio. But, this is exactly what I wondered about when I saw this thing.

April fools a few months late??

Sure, it's bona fide, but it still reads like a joke.

Unreal.

-ml