25 Facts About Sound cards

Sound cards card is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs.

Sound cards are used for computer-based communication such as voice over IP and teleconferencing.

Some cards include a sound chip to support the production of synthesized sounds, usually for real-time generation of music and sound effects using minimal data and CPU time.

Early PC sound cards had multiple FM synthesis voices which were used for MIDI music.

The full capabilities of advanced cards are often not fully used; only one or two voice and channel are usually dedicated to playback of digital sound samples, and playing back more than one digital sound sample usually requires a software downmix at a fixed sampling rate.

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The cards were often poor at sound effects such as laughs, but for music was by far the best sound cards available until the mid-nineties.

Until the early 2000s, when the AC'97 audio standard became more widespread and eventually usurped the SoundBlaster as a standard due to its low cost and integration into many motherboards, Sound Blaster compatibility was a standard that many other sound cards supported to maintain compatibility with many games and applications released.

Early ISA bus sound cards were half-duplex, meaning they couldn't record and play digitized sound simultaneously.

Conventional PCI bus Sound cards generally do not have these limitations and are mostly full-duplex.

Sound cards have evolved in terms of digital audio sampling rate .

Along the way, some Sound cards started offering wavetable synthesis, which provides superior MIDI synthesis quality relative to the earlier Yamaha OPL based solutions, which uses FM-synthesis.

Some higher-end cards introduced their own RAM and processor for user-definable sound samples and MIDI instruments as well as to offload audio processing from the CPU.

Professional sound cards are sound cards optimized for high-fidelity, low-latency multichannel sound recording and playback.

Professional sound cards are usually described as audio interfaces, and sometimes have the form of external rack-mountable units using USB, FireWire, or an optical interface, to offer sufficient data rates.

In general, consumer-grade sound cards impose several restrictions and inconveniences that would be unacceptable to an audio professional.

Consumer sound cards are limited in the effective sampling rates and bit depths they can actually manage and have lower numbers of less flexible input channels.

Professional studio recording use typically requires more than the two channels that consumer sound cards provide, and more accessible connectors, unlike the variable mixture of internal—and sometimes virtual—and external connectors found in consumer-grade sound cards.

Some platforms have had sound cards designed for their bus architectures that cannot be used in a standard PC.

Certain early arcade machines made use of sound cards to achieve playback of complex audio waveforms and digital music, despite being already equipped with onboard audio.

Also, many types of professional sound cards have the form of an external FireWire or USB unit, usually for convenience and improved fidelity.

Sound cards using the PCMCIA Cardbus interface were available before laptop and notebook computers routinely had onboard sound.

USB sound cards are external devices that plug into the computer via USB.

DJs who use DJ software typically use sound cards integrated into DJ controllers or specialized DJ sound cards.

DJ sound cards sometimes have inputs with phono preamplifiers to allow turntables to be connected to the computer to control the software's playback of music files with timecode vinyl.

However, many USB sound cards do not conform to the standard and require proprietary drivers from the manufacturer.

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