WEBVTT 00:00:00.240 --> 00:00:05.760 It wasn't too long ago that if you wanted good or even passable sound from your computer, 00:00:05.760 --> 00:00:08.820 you'd need a dedicated sound card. 00:00:08.820 --> 00:00:14.160 But nowadays, even though you can still buy them, most PC enthusiasts recommend you skip the sound card 00:00:14.160 --> 00:00:18.280 entirely and just instead use the audio that's integrated into your motherboard. 00:00:18.280 --> 00:00:21.520 So how did this happen? To understand, we need to take a look back 00:00:21.520 --> 00:00:25.160 at why dedicated sound cards even existed in the first place. 00:00:25.160 --> 00:00:29.720 You know that little PC speaker that comes with some other boards that beeps at you 00:00:29.920 --> 00:00:33.640 to let you know that your computer booted okay or has some kind of issue? 00:00:33.640 --> 00:00:36.680 Well, way back during the 1980s, 00:00:36.680 --> 00:00:40.240 when the original IBM PC and compatibles ruled the day, 00:00:40.240 --> 00:00:45.480 a larger version of that little speaker was the only source of sound for many users. 00:00:45.480 --> 00:00:50.120 This means that you would be limited to just beeps and boops, though there were some tricks 00:00:50.120 --> 00:00:54.840 that programmers used to get the PC speaker to make other sounds, such as this box piece 00:00:54.840 --> 00:00:57.880 that was used as the intro to a 1982 classic 00:00:57.880 --> 00:01:02.080 called Paratrooper. As you can tell, the speaker didn't exactly sound 00:01:02.080 --> 00:01:05.320 all that great and early PC CPUs also had 00:01:05.320 --> 00:01:10.320 to more or less drop everything else they were doing while that speaker was trying to chirp at you. 00:01:10.320 --> 00:01:16.560 So obviously a better solution was needed. So the idea was to offload audio processing 00:01:16.560 --> 00:01:22.240 to a separate sound card so that the system wouldn't have to depend solely on the main CPU. 00:01:22.240 --> 00:01:27.400 And as the years went by, sound cards supported more and more features and better and better audio quality, 00:01:27.400 --> 00:01:32.520 partly due to their role as hardware accelerators, meaning that the extra hardware on the sound card 00:01:32.520 --> 00:01:37.400 could do the heavy lifting of processing all that audio instead of leaving it all to the CPU. 00:01:37.400 --> 00:01:42.600 Similar actually to the difference between having a discrete graphics card and onboard graphics, 00:01:42.600 --> 00:01:46.480 except without a dedicated area on the CPU die for audio. 00:01:46.480 --> 00:01:51.840 And while it is true that integrated audio for motherboards became more prevalent in the late 1990s 00:01:51.840 --> 00:01:57.200 thanks to Intel's AC97 audio codec that got incorporated into onboard chips, 00:01:57.200 --> 00:02:02.440 sound cards were still more powerful solutions that delivered noticeably better quality. 00:02:02.440 --> 00:02:07.340 So folks that care about audio didn't have much reason to ditch sound cards just yet. 00:02:07.340 --> 00:02:12.280 That said, sound cards weren't perfect. Because hardware acceleration for audio 00:02:12.280 --> 00:02:15.400 was implemented differently by different manufacturers, 00:02:15.400 --> 00:02:18.960 you needed a specific driver for your car to work properly. 00:02:18.960 --> 00:02:23.840 Kind of like how you need a specific AMD or NVIDIA driver these days for your graphics card 00:02:23.840 --> 00:02:28.080 to function. These drivers were often notoriously poorly written 00:02:28.080 --> 00:02:31.080 and unstable. So starting in Windows Vista, 00:02:31.080 --> 00:02:34.400 Microsoft tried to standardize how audio was handled, 00:02:34.400 --> 00:02:39.320 which also enabled features like per application volume control from the operating system itself. 00:02:39.320 --> 00:02:43.040 And did it by forcing the system to handle audio in software 00:02:43.040 --> 00:02:48.080 instead of through a hardware accelerated card. This meant that the CPU was suddenly handling 00:02:48.080 --> 00:02:51.880 a lot more audio processing. And in games and other applications 00:02:51.880 --> 00:02:56.040 that were built around hardware acceleration in the form of a sound card, 00:02:56.040 --> 00:03:01.360 many users experienced buggy audio and performance issues early on. 00:03:01.360 --> 00:03:06.160 However, the good news is that by this point, CPUs were already powerful enough 00:03:06.160 --> 00:03:09.760 to handle audio processing without a big performance hit, 00:03:09.760 --> 00:03:12.860 a far cry from the early PCs we mentioned previously. 00:03:12.860 --> 00:03:16.440 So as applications started to catch up and support software based standards 00:03:16.440 --> 00:03:21.000 like Microsoft's universal audio architecture, it became the case that all you needed 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:25.880 for good quality sound was a modern CPU and an audio device that supported UAA, 00:03:25.880 --> 00:03:31.200 such as those real tech HD audio chips that are now ubiquitous on all motherboards. 00:03:31.200 --> 00:03:34.720 These chips are much simpler than full blown sound cards. 00:03:34.720 --> 00:03:37.720 As much of the work that would be done by a sound card's processor 00:03:37.720 --> 00:03:43.160 can be handled by the main CPU of the system, leaving the real tech chip to handle simpler tasks 00:03:43.160 --> 00:03:48.640 like digital to analog conversion. And as quality has improved on the real tech chips themselves 00:03:48.640 --> 00:03:52.320 and motherboard manufacturers have taken care in designing their audio circuits 00:03:52.320 --> 00:03:56.300 so that they won't be as affected by electrical interference from the rest of the system, 00:03:56.300 --> 00:04:00.600 today we're at the point where onboard audio is actually quite good. 00:04:00.600 --> 00:04:04.560 Separate sound cards, while they can still give slightly better audio quality, 00:04:04.560 --> 00:04:09.280 are often only recommended for enthusiasts who need the extra processing muscle 00:04:09.280 --> 00:04:13.800 for a niche applications or for specific ports. But even users who need a bit more power 00:04:13.800 --> 00:04:19.360 for their high impedance headphones are often advised to get an external DAC slash amp 00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:23.400 instead of a sound card. As external solutions are often isolated completely 00:04:23.400 --> 00:04:27.020 from the electrically noisy environment inside a PC. 00:04:27.020 --> 00:04:30.720 But if you do end up needing a sound card for some reason, 00:04:30.720 --> 00:04:36.480 don't think that their development has been totally neglected. I mean, after all, you can get them with RGB. 00:04:36.480 --> 00:04:39.580 So thanks for watching guys, like this video, subscribe, follow us, do all that stuff, 00:04:39.580 --> 00:04:43.220 and also hit us up in the comments with your suggestions for topics 00:04:43.220 --> 00:04:44.920 that we should hit in the future.