Large music collection on Home Theater... how to?

Are the speakers active or passive? I doubt you can drive passive ones with just the soundcard itself. The worst thing that could happen is that it permanently damages the amplification unit of the card *g*

EDIT: I should mention pulseaudio. Maybe it's worth setup a unix system on the PS3 (and the audioserver), so you can use it. pulseaudio is really neat, since it allows you to use remote sound devices from everywhere in the local network (even WAN works).

I have a central audioserver setup, which houses my entire music collection. It's connected to an external USB DAC, which in turn is connected to my headphones and a hifi system.
However I have also a desktop system in another room, which has also a small audio system (headphone + Creative Labs setup). With pulseaudio I can just tell the audioserver that it should stream the decoded stream over the network to the desktop system, so I can listen it there.

I could also connect the DAC and the bigger hifi system at the desktop, it would make no difference.

You can even synchronize all the different audio devices to get music in the entire house. I don't use this often, but it works as well.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Be aware that you need a client application that can "talk" pulseaudio.

On linux this isn't a big problem since most sound applications have an ALSA backend. With ALSA you can create a virtual device that pipes everything to the pulseaudio server. So every app that has ALSA support can therefore talk to pulseaudio.
Native support is better though, but the virtual device method works as well.

In fact that's not entirely accurate. If you've read the pulseaudio description, it's mentioned there that PA is a ESD drop-in replacement. So apps that support ESD work as well. ESD however is pretty dead and I never saw that many apps that used it in the first place.

There's nowhere I can't reach.