[LAU] Synths (software vs hardware, speed)

I'm now at the point where I can play midi files, and I have a midi keyboard connected and can play sounds to and from that. Timidity is rubbish, frankly, so I'm using fluidsynth, which works fine. However, for some reason I can't get qsynth to work. Qsynth1: Failed to create the MIDI driver (alsa_seq). No MIDI input will be available. No matter what settings I try, it always fails. The only useful message I ever got was for alsa_raw, when it said that the device didn't exist. For some reason I have /dev/snd/midiC1D0, but not /dev/snd/midiC0D0. So I temporarily symlinked them, but that didn't help- it wasn't complaining about a missing device any more, but it still couldn't create the midi driver and still wouldn't tell me why not. Also, both fluidsynth and timidity are too slow. Midi events are routed around instantly (tested with vkeybd and the keyboard I have plugged in), but there is a delay in playing anything sent to fluidsynth or timidity- about half a second or so. I've tried running fluidsynth with nice -9, but that just makes everything else less responsive and doesn't really decrease the delay at all. Any suggestions? If I was to buy a decent sound card with a hardware synth would this fix it? Would I be able to load enough soundfonts into it? What about a pcmcia/cardbus version for my laptop? Thanks Simon