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What is the purpose of sound card in PC ?


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Way back in college, when purchasing a PC, you need to purchase separate sound card for audio/music. Nowadays, it's already built in in the motherboard. I wonder, will buying a separate sound card will have great effect in sound quality ? If so,, is it worth the price ? Checking online, it's usually $100 for entry level sound card.

 

Next question is, I know sound card improves the overall sound but what do sound card really do in technical terms ?  

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What sound device does

  • To add sound rendering(output) or capturing(input) ports to PC. Sound output device is selectable by OS provided settings user interface or userland API.

 

About sound quality

  • Motherboard built-in audio sound quality varies from superb level to very bad (constant hiss and/or intermittent noise heard). If you are unlucky to have not so good sound implementation of motherboard, buying sound card or external USB DAC may improve sound quality.

 

There may be extra functions only provided by sound card / USB audio interfaces:

  • DSD playback/recording
  • XLR balanced sound output/input
  • Phantom power supply function to use condenser microphone for sound recording
  • MIDI in/out to control MIDI piano keyboards or hardware sound synthesizers
  • External word clock input/output to synchronize multiple audio/video equipment,
  • Hardware realtime sound DSP for stage performance / You Tube live
  • Dolby Atmos decoder functionality to map virtually positioned speaker sound to 12 channel real speakers

Sunday programmer since 1985

Developer of PlayPcmWin

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4 hours ago, yamamoto2002 said:

What sound device does

  • To add sound rendering(output) or capturing(input) ports to PC. Sound output device is selectable by OS provided settings user interface or userland API.

 

About sound quality

  • Motherboard built-in audio sound quality varies from superb level to very bad (constant hiss and/or intermittent noise heard). If you are unlucky to have not so good sound implementation of motherboard, buying sound card or external USB DAC may improve sound quality.

 

There may be extra functions only provided by sound card / USB audio interfaces:

  • DSD playback/recording
  • XLR balanced sound output/input
  • Phantom power supply function to use condenser microphone for sound recording
  • MIDI in/out to control MIDI piano keyboards or hardware sound synthesizers
  • External word clock input/output to synchronize multiple audio/video equipment,
  • Hardware realtime sound DSP for stage performance / You Tube live
  • Dolby Atmos decoder functionality to map virtually positioned speaker sound to 12 channel real speakers

 

 

Wow.. thank you for prompt reply. Very informative.

 

To improve sound from my pc... I need amp, DAC, USB soundcard (PCIe is not an option for me for current setup) ?

 

Can I connect 3 of them ? Or just choose 1 or 2 of them ?

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I 'm not topicality police, but this is Objective-Fi sub-forum where people  discuss scientific / objective audio. So I don't say about my subjective opinion to improve sound 😁

 

There are several ways of connecting PC to speakers.

ComputerAudioSetups_a.thumb.png.ff4ddfc98e89dadb60acaa1e300a189d.png

Sunday programmer since 1985

Developer of PlayPcmWin

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  • 2 weeks later...

Biggest benefit of a real sound card in PC is it's proper DMA capability. With USB interface you need constant intensive CPU activity to deal with USB audio class protocol. With a traditional sound card the audio hardware and player software can share the same memory buffer. Player places data in the buffer and the audio card reads it out by itself straight from the system RAM.

 

On positive side, you are also not exposed to the limitations of USB Audio Class and such. On negative side, each piece of hardware needs it's own custom driver for the OS.

 

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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