Many people use a soundblaster alongside a quality card. You may find
you don't need it unless you make use of the onboard midi.

A card like the SoundBlaster Audigy or some of the better on-board sound
systems are suitable for casual monitoring and debugging. They are
beneficial only if you route all those crazy Windows desktop noises to them,
since they are then kept away from the serious work.

I guess I assumed that anyone even remotely interested in audio would
long ago have disabled all Windows sounds :-)