[Cialug] MythTV Sound card recommendations

[Michael Standfest]

For some silly reason, I tried upgrading my mythbox a few weeks ago.
I was still running mythbuntu 8.0.4.1 beta 3 and it worked, but I
couldn't get mythtv frontends on other boxes to connect since my
backend was so far out of date.  And I have been having issues with
the sound drivers since the new install (this was also a major issue
when I first installed it two years ago).  Apparently, this is pretty
common for the Realtek ALC1200 since it is a closed source card and it
is pretty rare to the get the spdif optical sound thingie to work,
never mind that getting it to work at all can be quite a chore.  I
eventually got the sound to work with alsamixer to an extent, (PCM and
Main volumes are set to 100, and everything in alsamixer is set to 99;
the sound on my audio receiver is also set at the maximum) but it is
still pretty quiet.  I can hear it if the room is quiet, but with four
children, the room is never quiet.

Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone could recommend a sound card.  I would
like it to be 5.1 capable.  Otherwise, it just needs to fit in a
mini-itx case.  I have one PCI and one PCI Express available.  I am so
out of the loop on hardware, I have just been looking at newegg and
then comparing the sound card in the ALSA SoundCard Matrix and haven't
had much luck finding something that is well supported.  I also
wouldn't be opposed to getting a different video card if it had hdmi
output that supported sound using a flavor of mythtv.  But I'm
wondering if this would be more along the lines of getting a new
motherboard?!

This is what I have:
Western Digital 500GB SATA HD
Samsung SATA DVD Burner
ASUS M3A78-EM AM2+ 780G/SB700 Motherboard -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131324
CASE IN-WIN|IW-BT611T.300SL (probably not a concern)
AMD A64 X2 5200 2.7G AM2 65N
8 GB of RAM
1 pchdtv 5500 tuner
1 SiliconDust HD tuner

I would normally shop by what the developers have, but that part of
the mythbuntu page appears to be down:
http://www.mythbuntu.org/developer-hardware

Thanks for the help in advance.
Michael