SPDIF sound in F32

After wrestling all day with an ASUS Xonar SE card (with accompanying Googling), I now believe that this card cannot be made to work in Linux. Stereo output through the green line out port works fine, but SPDIF does not. "lspci" actually claims this thing is a USB controller, although as I mentioned stereo sound does work. Does anybody have a PCIe sound card that is known to work with SPDIF 5.1 surround sound output? It has to be optical as those are the only digital ports on my receiver. One frustrating thing about trying to search for information online is that I come up with a lot of stuff that is way too old to be useful. For instance, a lot of the advice articles I found on getting sound working mention 4Front and OSS sound drivers, which is probably 15-20 year old information. I'm looking for first hand "yes I know this card works", or at least a pointer to something that isn't Ubuntu specific and is recent enough to be useful. Thanks, --Greg