Sound cards

I used to follow the Rightmark audio forum closely. These audio experts measure soundcard performance objectively.

http://audio.rightmark.org/

Speaking of soundcards, another alternative is to get a high quality external DAC accepting USB or FW input (or maybe even truly optical input for complete electrical separation between the noisy PC hardware and your audio system; which will of course require a an optical card of some sort. SPDIF & Toslink is more conventional.

Of course if you want to just jack a headset into the PC then you probably want a PC soundcard - or maybe something like this?

http://www.audiophileproducts.com/fubar3 

I don't own this and haven't reviewed it - but it shows a simple USB DAC - it's space efficient, uses asynchronous data buffering (USB protocol rather than streaming SPDIF with embedded clock signal and has a separate power supply, not drawing power from the same PSU as the PC). 

No special audio drivers required - the default Windows USB audio wave device driver can be used, it's built in and more or less any version of Windows, certainly Vista and 7 will detect and use the soundcard. Rely on Microsofts driver, not some 3rd party mish mash.

It goes well with the foobar (second millenium edition) player

http://www.foobar2000.org/

foobar also supports WASAPI exclusive mode via an extension (these are called components); meaning it can take exclusive control over an audio source to avoid mixing in other audio sources; this doesn't really matter much in the post-XP world (meaning Vista, 7, aso) but it's still nice if you have some material you want to stream in a pure way without windows sound "interference".

I believe that has to do with Vista - (new driver model days) and probably not anymore as Creative has had some... .... .... time..... ... ... to adapt ... ... . ..