external sound card

[Jan Stary <stare@ns.arachne.cz>]

[ Sorry, now with nonmalicious headers and subject ]

Hi,

as my Acer Laptop only has a via ac97 chipset and one mono (mic) input and
one stereo (headphone) output, I consider getting some additional
hardware.

I have two USB ports and a PCMCIA Card slot. Which one is better to use as
a sound input/output? I mean sound quality and latency.

I am running ecasound on top of alsa 0.9.2 and the 2.5.66 kernel.

Any suggestions for a particular card/device/setup? 

Thanks a lot.

Jan