It's a system thing
The question is, what are you doing with the audio?
Are you using your PC as a production station with something like Pro-Tools, Cubase, Reason, or something else that plays back and mixes multiple tracks with multiple effects?
Are you using your PC as a home media center that will be the signal source for your main speakers?
Are you using your PC as a hard-disk recorder for music?
For an audio workstation, I feel that it is important to have multiple hard disks on seperate IDE channels. It's probably worthwhile to have a small but fast "scratch" disk, and in fact many of these programs ask for you to specify a scratch disk that is seperate from the main system disk.
For a home media/theater center, thermal considerations are a big deal. With an audio workstation you might be able to put the noisy PC into a cabinet or ventilated isolation box, but you're probably not so lucky in your home listening environment. This means that power consumption is critical. For high performance, Athlon 64 seems to be winning right now. It's more expensive, but a Pentium M is also a good solution. Pentium M has only modest processing performance, but it's a laptop chip so it really sips power.
As a hard disk recorder, you want a ton of RAM and a processor setup that is good for multitasking. Even moreso, you'll need a hard disk setup that is supportive of the task at hand. This might mean using a lot of different hard drives.
For any of these tasks, the Athlon 64 X2 series seems like a good contendor, since they have good performance in multitasking, good access to RAM, and low power consumption.
As a final word- people have been happily doing all kinds of audio things on PCs for (practically) the last decade. For most of the applications I listed here, the overall system configuration is much more likely to be the limiting factor than the processor.
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