Utter Noob Needs Good Quality Sound card

[growse]

I'm after a sound card for my HTPC that I'm building. My initial requirement is a good quality stereo analog out into my hifi for playing music. However, in the future, I'm hoping to be able to upgrade to a surround amp for DVDs and possibly blueray. When I upgrade, should I just use the optical out from the sound card into the amp and get that to do the decoding or should I just get an HDMI-compatible amp and use HDMI all the way? I've heard that for blueray, you can only get the full quality audio over HDMI - how true is this?

I'm looking at the D2X at the moment, but should I splash the cash on an HDAV card and have HDMI compatability for the future?

Also, most of the high end sound cards I've seen assume I'm running Windows - if I wanted to run Linux, would I be restricted in any of my choices?

Thanks all

 

[Phatzy]

onboard sound is so damn good now, can you not use that? or the asus Xonar HDAV1.3 with HDMI built-in but at a high price

 

[growse]

This is a good point for digital - I don't know if there are any disadvantages of using digital out for an onboard. I know some are just 48kHz whereas more expensive cards use 192kHz.

For analog, my experience in the past has been that onboard is nowhere near as good as either an external DAC or a decent quality sound card (I've got a FW410 on my desktop, which is pretty good).