Computer sound card

A sound card is a semiconductor circuitry that allows you to work with sound on a computer. The very first computers, for about 10 years, did not assume the use of sounds, and all that could be heard from them were the clicks of various electronic-mechanical relays and the monophonic sound of the built-in speaker that sounded the state of the system and the operation of some applications and games.

The progenitor of the sound card can be considered a device company Covox Inc, which was connected to the printer port IBM PC and could play digital monophonic sound. In addition, this fact indicates that Covox became the first external sound card.

Since 1988, Creative has been producing sound cards based on a processor from Yamaha. However, the artificial sound of the instruments was still far from perfect, and the audio files occupied a huge amount of memory - about 10 megabytes per minute of sound.

Next, the sound card began to represent a repository of MIDI sounds, and the multimedia files contained links to commands for playing a particular sound.

With the advent of more powerful processors, since about 1998, most manufacturers have integrated the EAX technology and audio processor into the sound card, switched to PCI buses, and to date the principle of extraction of sound from the computer has not changed significantly.

Modern sound cards are divided into built-in, built-in and external. Built-in cards consist in the general circuit of the motherboard. All audio inputs and outputs are also on it. The processing of sound is handled by the CPU. You do not need to install the sound card driver.

Currently, in connection with the growth of the performance of the central processing unit of computers, many motherboards have integrated sound cards that are characterized by increased power and high quality characteristics.

Built-in sound cards can be connected at will to the consumer in special PCI slots. They have their own powerful processor, which provides high quality sound. Among them, you can identify multimedia, semi-professional and professional sound cards.

Multimedia sound card is designed for home user. It is able to ensure the sound quality of the Hi-Fi level and look decent in combination with computer acoustics 5.1.

Semi-professional sound cards are designed for consumers with overcharged requests for a good sound. As a rule, along with the quality of their high cost.

Professional sound cards are designed to meet the needs of musicians and their producers, arrangers and those who record and produce music, the highest quality of reproduction and the minimum distortion of sound. Such cards can handle any 3D sound. For them, specially developed software and produced additional professional equipment.

External sound cards - as a rule, are located outside the computer case and are connected to it via USB 2.0 or FireWire interface. They solve the following problems:

• Eliminate electromagnetic interference from other computer components that affect sound quality and create phonetic noises. In embedded cards, this problem is usually solved by additional isolation, which leads to a rise in the cost of the device.
• Connecting a large number of cables, including from microphones, a mixing console, an amplifier, to an external sound card block, is much easier than putting this bundle of wires together with others on one computer.
• A remote sound card can be connected to any mobile device that has the required connector, for example, to a laptop.