How do you get Good Sound from a PC ?

The best sound from a pc is not had via a soundcard at all. All the emi from within a computer is hardly the place for d/a conversion to occur. The best sound will be had from using any of a number of pro audio equipment via a usb or firewire (iee1394) connection. I currently use a roland usb device which allows me to d/a convert at my equipment rack via decent, but hardly top of the line dac's. The absolute best way that I know of is using the motu equipment via the firewire bus, this gives you all the inputs and outputs that you could ever need, balanced and unbalanced, digital and analog and gain controls as well. Its like a preamp and dac combined with the bonus of interfacing with your computer. It goes without saying that you should not compress files into mp3 but rather wave which neccessitates a large hard drive. I currently convert all my cd's to wave files using exact audio copy, and use apples itunes as a player. My setup is as follows, apple g4 cube, monster 12' usb cable to roland ua 30 dac/preamp, unbalanced analog to mcintosh mc 2102, to living voice avatar obx speakers, all cables nordost blue heaven. I love this setup namely because I love my computer and I like the convience of having a gui to all my cd's. The roland ua 30 can be had on ebay for about 150 bucks. The motu devices can be quite high, around 1000 bucks.