[ardour-users] A decent sound card for Ardour

[John Emmas]

In the not-too-distant future I'm hoping to do some development work for 
Ardour - so one of my first tasks was to get Linux up & running on my PC. 
I'm entirely new to Linux and I must admit, I've been less than impressed 
with its clunky and patchy method of installing drivers.  Once things work, 
they tend to work quite well - but getting them to work in the first place 
is a long and very arduous process.

The past 5 weeks have been hugely frustrating.  Lots of my hardware (even 
including my graphics card !! ) failed to work properly.  But little by 
little I've overcome the problems and got everything (almost) working. 
However, I doubt that I'll be able to find a driver for my sound card - an 
Antex StudioCard - so a new sound card will have to be my next purchase.

I guess that most people are just using Ardour with the standard on-board 
sound hardware (supplied with their motherboards).  But are there any 'high 
end' cards I should be looking at?  For example, multi-channel sound cards - 
or cards that support Dolby 5.1 / 7.1 etc?  In theory, 5.1 is supported by 
my motherboard but I've never figured out where the outputs are..!!  Thanks.

John