Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Where Did SOUND CARDS Go?”.
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 other boards that beefs at you and let you know that your computer, booted, ok 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 Boop’s, 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 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 AC 97 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 PC, as we mentioned previously, so as applications started to catch up and support software based standards like Microsoft, 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 you AAA, such as those Realtek HD, audio chips that are now ubiquitous on all um other boards.
These chips are much simpler than full-blown sound cards as much of the work that would be done by a sound cards. Processor can be handled by the main CPU of the system, leaving the realtek chip to handle simpler tasks like digital to analog conversion and as 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 Anish 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.
/ amp, instead of a sound card as external solutions are often isolated completely from the electrically noisy environment in PC. But if you do end up meeting 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.
This video is brought to you by Monday, comm Monday. Comm is the productivity tool that helps you manage your work, it’s simple to set up for you and your team and it’s super customizable. You can import any diva that you need and share it with.
Whoever needs to be on that project. You can track project progress at a glance with different view options and you can automate tasks, so you can focus on getting work done Monday. Comm is awesome because it integrates with tons of third-party products like excel slack, JIRA Dropbox. The list just goes on and on so sign up today for an extended 30-day free trial at the link below. So, thanks for watching guys like this video subscribe, follow us do all that stuff and also hit us up in the comments with your suggestions for topics that we should hit in the future. .