The way the computer industry works, you'll get more out of your money by spending $1000-1200 now and $800-1000 in a year or two than by spending $2000 now.
Personally, here's what I'd do:
Case:
Antec P182 ($150)
You've got a sizeable budget, so get a nice case. This will have plenty of room, be nice and quiet, and keep everything nice and cool. There are other great cases out there, this is just one. As a side note, it's frequently on sale for much less than $150, so I'd shop around and see if you can spot a better price.
Power Supply:
Corsair 520HX ($110)
A very solid power supply with stable rails, cool and quiet operation, and modular cables. Should have plenty of headroom for future expansion too. If you have something more daring in mind in terms of future expansion, you could consider the 620HX. Again, Newegg's price might not be the best if you shop around.
CPU:
Intel Q6600 OEM ($250)
The OEM processor comes without a heatsink, but that saves you $25. Most people around here would recommend that with a quad core you consider an aftermarket heatsink. This is especially true if you want to overclock, which the Q6600 does very easily.
Heatsink:
Sunbeam Tuniq Tower ($40)
Probably more commonly recommended around here for the quad cores than any other heatsink. If you want to look into alternatives, people in this forum or the cases and cooling forum would have plenty of opinions.
Motherboard:
Gigabyte EP35-DS3P ($150)
What motherboard you choose will largely be a question of your specific needs. I chose this one on the very possibly erroneous assumption that with lots of video and audio editing you might want the firewire ports. However, it only has two PCI slots, so if you want or need more than two PCI cards, you'd have to pick a different board. There are plenty of good choices out there, and the P35 chipset is the best bet for what you're doing.
RAM:
2x2GB DDR2-800 ($90)
Go with 4GB, as cheap as RAM is these days. DDR2-800 will give you the headroom to overclock your Q6600 to 3.6GHz, if it will go that far. Faster RAM is not necessary.
Video Card:
8800GTS 512MB ($260)
As others have said, this is probably the best choice for your budget, especially with gaming on a 24" monitor. The HD3870x2 is another option, but it's significantly more expensive, and I've heard mixed things about it.
Hard Drive:
Samsung Spinpoint 500GB Hard Drive ($105)
I picked this one because I'm personally very happy with mine. The Spinpoint series is known for being quiet, and it's completely inaudible even when I don't have music/games on. However, the major hard drive manufacturers all make quality disks and you won't go wrong with a Seagate, Western Digital or Hitachi either. If you need more than 500GB, 750GB and 1TB are getting more affordable, and you could look around for a good deal. (Or you could just buy 2 500GB drives.)
Optical Drive:
Samsung 203B
This is a popular recommendation, but optical drives are all more or less the same. I'm happy with my LiteOn, and some people swear by their Asus or Pioneer burners. If you want LightScribe, then you'll need the 203N instead of the 203B.
All of that comes under $1200 but doesn't include shipping prices, the cost of an operating system, or keyboard/mouse/speakers.
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