Late to the party..... had family in for the weekend....

In my experience, a factory sound card (reltek and others) will work fine with BB and even RB under most conditions. The problems arise when you start to mix audio tracks with midi based synth tracks.

The midi synths take longer to process and as a result you get a delay or latency in hearing the midi. Trying to record audio over the latency is a real PITA.

Buying a sound blaster, no matter how good, is generally NOT the answer since they still have issues with ASIO. In fairness to SB, I heard some time back that they do have some cards now that will work fine in recording environments.

Personally, I recommend a dedicated audio/midi interface running on native (no wrappers) ASIO drivers, and one that has nice clean preamps in it with phantom power. That gets you into the Presonus, M-Audio, Focusrite, and Roland interfaces. There are other brands, but one should always be an informed buyer and not just buy something that catches the eye for it's cool looks.

Way to often, assisting in the Sonar forums, I have seen people buy the "gizmo" style card... "it slices, it dices and it does sound too!" kind of thing. Maybe I'm just old school, but I like the plain and simple, rock solid, get the job done without the frills, audio interface.

You mentioned doing "a couple of albums" in 2014..... so I would invest in some good gear to make that job easier. If you're just doing instrumental stuff that is solely BB, you might be OK with any sound card, but to work with audio mixed with synths, and BB/RB tracks, I would opt for the better, rock solid USB musical interface.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.