Where Did SOUND CARDS Go?

Why are sound cards no longer a must-have item?

Buy Sound Cards

[Shadow-ighf]

Don't need a sound card..can't hear above 60fps.

[lohar]

In 2030:
"where did GRAPHICS CARDS go?"

[AdamGarrett]

A portion of history that seems to be overlooked here, is when the soundblaster cards integrated MIDI and the game port onto the cards as well. I first got a sound card in the early 90's, and the same device that was allowing me to control Lara Croft's movement was also allowing me to hear her lovely voice.

[batina]

Kids will never know the pain of mid 90s to early 00s - freshly installed Windows booting and sound not working for some unknown reason.
And the pure joy when you finally installed proper driver version that actually works, rebooted and you heard windows go taadaaa... I felt goosebumps as I wrote this.

[ridingnerdy]

My favorite is people who spend $200-$300 on a sound card...then use USB headphones.

[CMDR-Kat]

“Early integrated speaker didn’t sound great as you can hear”

*can’t hear because LTT won’t shutup long enough to let me listen*

[DaSharkCraftMC]

"They even come with RGB"

*I'LL TAKE YOUR ENTIRE STOCK!*

[trje]

"Way back in the '80's"

...well, it's official now ...i'm old.

[SingularityMedia]

Q: Where did sound cards go?
Music Production community: Wut?

[jorinator]

0:59 "as you can tell", no we can't tell because you were talking over it

[yornav]

Don’t forget that the first generation audio cards also hosted fm soundchips and were able to host soundfont files. Music in games of the early days was not integrated as audio data, but more like MIDI data. For that you needed a card that could translate that data to instrument like sounds instead of the beeps and bleeps of a pc speaker. Like the Soundblaster AWE32 I had back then. It was an AWEsome card for that time.

[KuraIthys]

Yeah, I remember when a bunch of advanced audio features basically vanished overnight.
Like hardware accelerated 3d positional audio.

AFAIK the death knell of standalone sound cards appears to have been HDMI encryption standards.

Encrypted HDMI was a demand made by film studios to make bluray harder to pirate.

That's all well and good but that means suddenly a whole heap of PC components have to support encryption/decryption.
That alone rendered a ton of hardware partially obsolete overnight.
Suddenly motherboards (in theory) had to encrypt PCI bus traffic.
Monitors had to support HDCP decryption. Operating systems had to support HDCP.
Obviously graphics cards now needed to be able to do HDCP encryption...

Oh, and graphics cards needed audio processing hardware. - hardware that's only in use when you have HDMI audio in play.
Upside is this is digital processing only.
Downside is graphics card companies didn't care about sound (at least compared to sound card manufacturers)
Plus all tgat encryption means the sound card is completely out of the loop now...
Rendering it 100% redundant except where the user has an analogue audio path enabled.

There are likely other factors...

But forcing HDCP to be implemented on the PC was a big one with many other negatives as well.
And all to appease film studio paranoia.
Joy.

[ezcosmo]

"LIMITED TO JUST BEEPS AND BOOBS"

Not a bad deal in my opinion.

[piip]

I bought a sound card as I work with music composing, but I noticed that I would never again play games without it. Damn, the experience improved a lot.

[snakeface]

External sound cards aren't needed at all, but I actually recommend having one... I was surprised at the difference between my PCs built in sound card and a cheap Focusrite interface.

[mrtwinky]

"Where Did SOUND CARDS Go?" no where, they've never went away, they're still here and still great.

[lukehinkle]

I remember playing Alone in the Dark on a computer with no sound card. Sounded like an Atari game but with at the time cutting edge graphics.

[archxcrtical]

I just download some extra sound when I need

[ErraticPT]

While sound cards are always better than on-board audio, you have to praise the makers on-board for the huge increase in quality in the last few years. Problem is finding a midpriced soundcard is almost impossible these days. The only cards sold are either dirt cheap garbage or expensive audiophile cards with features hardly anyone outside a studio would use.

[petercofrancesco]

It's amazing how long it took to get sound right and even now I'm dealing with a sound issue with recording Zoom through OBS. The drivers and the way they interact with the microphone and sound for virtual applications such as Zoom can often be a problem.