One card I can recommend for (slightly older) PCs running DOSBox is the Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96. Like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz it's using a VIA Envy24 chip, but it offers more.
It has a nice front module, which you can mount inside a 5.25" bay, with a lot of connections. It has: RCA Line In, RCA Phono (for old LPs), RCA Line-Out, Digital In/Out, MIDI In/Out, Headphone (with volume control knob) and Mic-In (with volume control knob). Last but not least, you can mount a WaveBlaster-compatible daughterboard inside the front module, where it is nicely shielded from the rest of the system. The only potential downside is that the most recent drivers are dated October 2008 and they support Vista, but I don't know about Windows 7.
I'm using one of these cards in a Pentium IV computer running XP and it's an absolute joy to use. I got a Roland SCB-55 installed inside the front module and a Roland MT-32 hooked up to the MIDI-Out and Line-In on the front module, both offering superb audio quality in older games running inside DOSBox. 😀
As for more recent soundcards oriented towards more modern applications, I think it's mainly a battle between Creative and Asus. The X-Fi based cards are pretty good, although some dislike the somewhat bloated and sometimes unstable drivers. Asus' drivers are suffering less from these issues apparently, but the downside for games is that they emulate EAX and it's not always 100% accurate.
Having said that, I actually don't use a soundcard from either of these companies in my modern rig. 🤣 I'm using the Auzentech X-Fi Forte, which is a PCI-Express soundcard with the X-Fi chip on it. They also used to have a PCI card which is very similar, called the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude. It's really just like a regular X-Fi soundcard from Creative, but with better components (DAC and OPAMPs) and they come standard with Dolby Digital Live enabled. The X-Fi Forte also has a nice headphone amplifier, which comes in handy when using more high-end headphones. Auzentech also recently re-released a PCI soundcard with the CMI8788 chip on it, the Auzentech X-Meridian 2g. This card uses the same chip as the Asus cards, so it might be a good alternative for them.