I don't have any experience with the m-audio or EMU offerings but the card that I use is an Asus Xonar DX (pci-e x1). I think I got it in 2007/8 for $100. I use optical pcm spdif toslink "or whatever it is" to an o1 dac amp to a four output headphone amp which goes to my krk rp5g2 speakers or k701s or other phones. Personally I don't really care about 44.1 48 96 192 khz sample rates but my card supports all of those. I also have a Tascam US-144 and M-audio Mobilepre, you can use additional USB devices for recording.
A good feature to have is loopback recording, there's not really a real term for it, basically a recording device provided by your sound card that's called "Stereo Mix" or "Wave", through which you can record the speaker output. For my workflow it's really necessary, I don't know how I could do without it. I mainly make tracks and record in Renoise which lacks native multi track recording capabilities, although is very good for sample editing, slicing, breakbeat drum programming, cool tracker tricks, chiptune stuff, etc. I used to use Directsound and sometimes record "Wave" to overdub while playing, but I've found that it's better to just record MIDI. Later I found out that if I use ASIO I can use my other output devices for monitoring, and as long as I'm playing on the Asus speaker output I can record through the "Wave" input.
If I want to record electric guitar, bass, or keys, I have those two other interfaces, which both have monitor signal sent to speakers or headphones or both, and both are hooked up to sets of speakers.
I don't really think latency is a big problem for most sound cards, although I can imagine that it would be if you are using Directsound instead of ASIO and haven't tried to set your buffer length to a working minimum. I'm not really sure about hardware mixing on sound cards but some have it, I'm just not sold on it since I haven't tried it. I don't think latency will vary very significantly between most higher end sound cards if you have a fast i5 or i7 desktop processor.
sndcld
