You're really going to want to use WASAPI for this. Using WASAPI allows the media player to change the bit and sample rate for the audio output. Setting it to 24 bit will cause CDs to be re-sampled degrading quality.
The only place bitstreaming will give you an advantage is during movie playback, allowing the computer to not have to deal with decoding. Even on movie playback if your software does a decent job at this the only advantage to bitstreaming is offloading the task from the CPU. Additionally, if you are playing blurays, to my knowledge there are still no chipsets that will bitstream the HD audio tracks, so you are stuck software decoading or bistreaming a non-HD.
I'm not familiar with media monkey, but from a quick search it looks like you're going to want to go to the settings for the 'output plugin' to select WASAPI. A word of warning, while using a WASAPI program you will not be able to have audio play from any other program currently running.