WEBVTT

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it wasn't too long ago that if you wanted good or even passable sound from

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your computer you need a dedicated sound

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card but nowadays even though you can still buy them most pc enthusiasts

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recommend you skip the sound card entirely and just instead use the audio

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that's integrated into your motherboard so how did this happen to understand we

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need to take a look back at why dedicated sound cards even existed in

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the first place you know that little pc speaker that comes with some

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motherboards that beeps at you and let you know that your computer booted okay

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or or has some kind of issue well way back during the 1980s when the original

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ibm pc and compatibles ruled the day a

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larger version of that little speaker was the only source of sound for many

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users this means that you would be limited to just beeps and boops though

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there were some tricks that programmers used to get the pc speaker to make other

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sounds such as this bach piece that was used as the intro to a 1982 classic

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called paratrooper as you can tell the speaker

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didn't exactly sound all that great and early pc cpus also had to more or less

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drop everything else they were doing while that speaker was trying to chirp

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at you so obviously a better solution was needed so the idea was to

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offload audio processing to a separate sound card so that the system wouldn't

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have to depend solely on the main CPU and as the years went by sound cards

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supported more and more features and better and better audio quality partly

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due to their role as hardware accelerators meaning that the extra

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hardware on the sound card could do the heavy lifting of processing all that

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audio instead of leaving it all to the CPU similar actually to the difference

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between having a discreet graphics card and onboard graphics except without a

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dedicated area on the CPU die for audio and while it is true that integrated

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audio from motherboards became more prevalent in the late 1990s thanks to

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Intel's ac97 audio codec that got incorporated into onboard chips sound

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cards were still more powerful solutions that delivered noticeably better quality

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so folks that care about audio didn't have much reason to ditch sound cards

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just yet that said sound cards weren't perfect because hardware

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acceleration for audio was implemented differently by different manufacturers

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you needed a specific driver for your car to work properly kind of like how

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you need a specific AMD or NVIDIA driver these days for your graphics card to

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function and these drivers were often notoriously poorly written and unstable

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so starting in Windows vista microsoft tried to standardize how audio was

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handled which also enabled features like per application volume control from the

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operating system itself and did it by forcing the system to handle audio in

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software instead of through a hardware accelerated card this meant that the CPU

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was suddenly handling a lot more audio processing and in games and other

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applications that were built around hardware acceleration in the form of a

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sound card many users experienced buggy

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audio and performance issues early on

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however the good news is that by this point cpus were already powerful enough

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to handle audio processing without a big performance hit a far cry from the early

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pcs we mentioned previously so as applications start to catch up and

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support software-based standards like microsoft's universal audio architecture

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it became the case that all you needed for good quality sound was a modern CPU

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and an audio device that supported uaa such as those real tech hd audio chips

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that are now ubiquitous on all motherboards these chips are much

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simpler than full blown sound cards as much of the work that would be done by a

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sound card's processor can be handled by the main CPU of the system leaving the

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real tech chip to handle simpler tasks like digital to analog conversion and

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this quality has improved on the realtek chips themselves and motherboard

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manufacturers have taken care in designing their audio circuits so that

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they won't be as affected by electrical interference from the rest of the system

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today we're at the point where onboard audio is actually quite good separate sound

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cards while they can still give slightly better audio quality are often only

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recommended for enthusiasts who need the extra processing muscle for niche

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applications or for specific ports but even users who need a bit more power for

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their high impedance headphones are often advised to get an external

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backslash amp instead of a sound card as

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external solutions are often isolated completely from the electrically noisy

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environment inside a pc but if you do end up needing a sound card for

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some reason don't think that their development has been totally neglected i

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mean after all you can get them with RGB this video is brought to you by monday.com

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thanks for watching guys like this video subscribe follow us do all that stuff

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and also hit us up in the comments with your suggestions for topics that we

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should hit in the future