It wasn't too long ago that if you wanted good or even passable sound from your computer,
you'd 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 other boards that beeps at you
to let you know that your computer booted okay 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 box 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 discrete graphics card and onboard graphics,
except without a dedicated area on the CPU die for audio.
And while it is true that integrated audio for 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. 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 started 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 as quality has improved on the real tech 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 a 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 DAC slash 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 mean, after all, you can get them with RGB.
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and also hit us up in the comments with your suggestions for topics
that we should hit in the future.