I'm a minor fan of Dell Monitors. While I despise any mass produced PC (boutique or home build for me), Dell's monitor are quite nice. I had 2x 2407 WFP-HC (1920x1200) previously and I loved them.

Dunno how much you can spare for a monitor, but if you want quality, ignore anything that is TN-based (or doesn't even tell you want LCD technology the panel is based on.) IPS is the goal, though there are a few variations of the tech in use. There's another LCD tech out, though I forget the name right now. (It's like MVA or something close.)

My current monitor is TN-based and it's actually a bad choise for image editing due to the narrow vertical viewing angle (I get discoloration above a certain viewing angle.) Useful for picking out inconsistencies in an image, but bad if I'm going for color accuracy and reproduction.

Anyway, most decent PC monitors come with an HDMI-in port and hopefully include an Audio-out port if they don't have built-in speakers. Until I bought my 40" TV, I had my PS3 hooked up to my monitor via HDMI. I had the audio passed through the HDMI to the Audio-out on the monitor. Connected that to the Audio-in on my PC. That let me still use the speakers attatched to my PC without have to switch connections on 2 things (the speaker input and monitor).