"Studio" or "reference" monitors are typically designed to be very accurate. The more you can hear, the better your mixes will translate onto other systems. Stereo systems are not a good solution because they are designed to "sound good", which means that they may be masking or enhancing certain aspects of the sound. The Bose "fake bass" sound is a prime example. It would be impossible to mix on little Bose speakers and expect the mix to sound good on anything but little Bose speakers!
Now 'accurate' isn't exactly the best word, because even reference monitors aren't going to be 'accurate'. If it was just a matter of a flat frequency response then everybody would use the same forumla. It's important that your monitors allow you to hear what you need to hear to make consistant mixes. It sounds kind of fishy, but once you get reference monitors you'll be amazed at what you can hear. Things might not sound "better", in fact they may sound worse, but the level of detail should be astounding!
Some studio monitors are active; typically biamplified. That means that you can simply run a line out of your mixer straight to the monitors.
Other monitors are passive, which means that you need to supply your own power amplifier. Amplification is just as important as the monitors themselves, so you'll run into a long list of reference amplifiers as well!
In either case, you typically need some sort of preamp or mixer between your soundcard and your power amp or active monitors to control actual volume level. Power amplifiers might have attenuation controls, but it's typically best to leave them at nearly full-on, and control volume *before* the amplifier. This is what happens in your integrated stereo receiver, which is a power amp and one or more preamp stages combined into one unit.
You can also control volume using the soundcard's software mixer, but that's not a good idea. For one thing it's not safe, as some applications can take control of the mixer and you can wind up with a pretty gnarly explosion
Not to mention that souncard mixers are digital, and amplifiing a severely degraded digital signal is much worse than amplifying a low level analog signal.
In some cases you can also hook passive reference monitors right up to your stereo receiver and use them just like regular speakers. But be careful, some reference monitors are 4ohm and most stereo receivers want an 8ohm load. Also, this isn't going to be as nice a setup as using a dedicated reference amplifer or active monitors, because quite frankly most stereo receivers either sound like shit, or sound too good.
For specific monitor help, try the Mixing/Mastering forum above. Do some searching though, because these questions get asked a lot!
Slackmaster 2000
