Motherboards only work with a specific series of CPU (or processor). There are many different series of CPU processors such as AMD XP series, AMD Athlon 64 series, Pentium 4, Pentium Celeron, etc. This is extremely important! If you plan to use X processor, you must select a motherboard that works with that processor.

There are a zillion brands, styles, and prices for motherboards. I think any reputable manufacturer of motherboards is fine. In my experience, there is no one standout company over all the others. I've never seen one motherboard manufacturer that blew away another motherboard manufacturer. As long as a motherboard meets the specs of your soundcard / computer interface, you should be just fine.

Motherboards are sometimes bare bones with very little features or they can have all kinds of fancy goodies. Some motherboards have USB 1.1 ports, USB 2.0 ports, Firewire ports, an integrated video card (which I don't recommend) and various amounts of PCI slots, PCI slots, PCI express, and maybe an AGP slot.

Motherboards have different Chipsets. Via makes one kind of chipset. Geforce makes another kind of chipset.. You may want to do a search for either of these on your soundcard manufacturer's site to see if they have problems with a certain chipset.