Compatibility with Cubase, Reason

[ArtS]

I have the Finale 2005 music notation program, on which I compose for orchestra. As far as the music itself, I have no problem, but I am very dissatisfied with the quality of the instrumental sounds. I know that getting a good sound card would help (the one I'm using is integrated to the motherboard), but I've been told that I would do better by using a sythesizer module or using a program like Cubase or Reason. If either of these is true, would that completely bypass my sound card? My main concern is improving the quality of the instrumental sounds, and then saving the score to a .wav file.

I was hoping to run across someone who has experience with these programs and would be able to steer me in the right direction. As a musician, I am very comfortable in Finale, but as you can tell, I'm a complete novice when I leave it and bring in a recording program.

I'm using a P4 (2600) - 1Gig Ram - 120Gig HD

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

ArtS.....