Often, you will hear from a lot of people that soundblasters and similar soundcards can be used for recording, i.e., 'pwede na'. I will not lie to you... they can, but with certain caveats.
Like I said earlier, drivers of consumer soundcards are often optimized for playback and not for recording. That's why it's often difficult (but not impossible) to get very low latencies with 'blasters. I know this from experience.
Moving up from blasters, the first thing you will experience is lower noise first, and a clearer representation of the panning from left to right. That's because better spec cards have better spec components. Among the first things I noticed was, apart from low noise, the soundstage could be better visualized. I could hear details that were not inherent in my 'blasters. Another thing was low latencies due to driver optimization; it was much easier to record stuff.
Got to tweakheadz.com and read up on the primer on "The Guide". You will learn a lot about the jargon used in recording, as well as pertinent techniques and tips that you could pick up.
