it wasn't too long ago that if you wanted good or even passable sound from
your computer you need a dedicated sound
card but nowadays even though you can still buy them most pc enthusiasts
recommend you skip the sound card entirely and just instead use the audio
that's integrated into your motherboard so how did this happen to understand we
need to take a look back at why dedicated sound cards even existed in
the first place you know that little pc speaker that comes with some
motherboards that beeps at you and let you know that your computer booted okay
or or has some kind of issue well way back during the 1980s when the original
ibm pc and compatibles ruled the day a
larger version of that little speaker was the only source of sound for many
users this means that you would be limited to just beeps and boops though
there were some tricks that programmers used to get the pc speaker to make other
sounds such as this bach piece that was used as the intro to a 1982 classic
called paratrooper as you can tell the speaker
didn't exactly sound all that great and early pc cpus also had to more or less
drop everything else they were doing while that speaker was trying to chirp
at you so obviously a better solution was needed so the idea was to
offload audio processing to a separate sound card so that the system wouldn't
have to depend solely on the main CPU and as the years went by sound cards
supported more and more features and better and better audio quality partly
due to their role as hardware accelerators meaning that the extra
hardware on the sound card could do the heavy lifting of processing all that
audio instead of leaving it all to the CPU similar actually to the difference
between having a discreet graphics card and onboard graphics except without a
dedicated area on the CPU die for audio and while it is true that integrated
audio from motherboards became more prevalent in the late 1990s thanks to
Intel's ac97 audio codec that got incorporated into onboard chips sound
cards were still more powerful solutions that delivered noticeably better quality
so folks that care about audio didn't have much reason to ditch sound cards
just yet that said sound cards weren't perfect because hardware
acceleration for audio was implemented differently by different manufacturers
you needed a specific driver for your car to work properly kind of like how
you need a specific AMD or NVIDIA driver these days for your graphics card to
function and these drivers were often notoriously poorly written and unstable
so starting in Windows vista microsoft tried to standardize how audio was
handled which also enabled features like per application volume control from the
operating system itself and did it by forcing the system to handle audio in
software instead of through a hardware accelerated card this meant that the CPU
was suddenly handling a lot more audio processing and in games and other
applications that were built around hardware acceleration in the form of a
sound card many users experienced buggy
audio and performance issues early on
however the good news is that by this point cpus were already powerful enough
to handle audio processing without a big performance hit a far cry from the early
pcs we mentioned previously so as applications start to catch up and
support software-based standards like microsoft's universal audio architecture
it became the case that all you needed for good quality sound was a modern CPU
and an audio device that supported uaa such as those real tech hd audio chips
that are now ubiquitous on all motherboards these chips are much
simpler than full blown sound cards as much of the work that would be done by a
sound card's processor can be handled by the main CPU of the system leaving the
real tech chip to handle simpler tasks like digital to analog conversion and
this quality has improved on the realtek chips themselves and motherboard
manufacturers have taken care in designing their audio circuits so that
they won't be as affected by electrical interference from the rest of the system
today we're at the point where onboard audio is actually quite good separate sound
cards while they can still give slightly better audio quality are often only
recommended for enthusiasts who need the extra processing muscle for niche
applications or for specific ports but even users who need a bit more power for
their high impedance headphones are often advised to get an external
backslash amp instead of a sound card as
external solutions are often isolated completely from the electrically noisy
environment inside a pc but if you do end up needing a sound card for
some reason don't think that their development has been totally neglected i
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