Sound and Sound Cards

Video Description

In this video from ITFreeTraining, I will be looking at how the computer creates sound. I will also look at what benefits you can get from adding a dedicated sound card or external sound devices to the computer. By the end of the video, you will have a good idea of what you can achieve and what hardware you will need in order to do it. Download PowerPoint: https://itfreetraining.com/handouts/ap/2c10.pptx PC Speaker To start with, let’s do a quick history lesson. The first IBM computer shipped with a large speaker called the PC speaker. This speaker was used to provide sound for the computer. This included beeps to indicate a hardware fault, but also sound for applications, including music. The speaker was limited to what it could achieve. Being just a speaker, it could not do stereo, did not have dedicated hardware support and thus required a lot of CPU power to operate. As sound cards were developed, the PC speaker was used less and less for computer audio. As this occurred, the larger speaker was no longer produced and was instead replaced by a smaller speaker. You might think that with the improvements in audio there would be no need for the PC speaker; however, it is still used today to produce beeps. Generally, when the computer is first switched on, a single beep will be produced sounding like this. For this reason, it is important to still have the PC speaker connected so you will be able to hear these beeps. Either a single beep when the computer starts up or a number of beeps in succession to indicate an error has occurred. PC speakers provide basic sound; however, they were limited to what they could produce and put an extra load on the CPU. Sounds Cards To overcome these problems, sound cards were developed. There have been many sound cards released over the years. Shown here is a Sound Blaster PRO which was popular back in the early 90’s. Sound cards like these significantly improved the sound quality over the PC speaker. The other advantage was the hardware on the card performed audio functions, which reduced the load on the CPU. The sound card could provide functions like stereo, sound mixing and also play music. These cards became very popular as they addressed the limitations of the PC speaker and provided superior sound. However, they would slowly start to disappear, so let’s have a look why. Sound Hardware on Motherboards In the late 90’s, sound chips started being integrated onto the motherboard. Sound cards were better than integrated sound chips and offered more features. However, surprisingly it was not hardware improvements that saw fewer sound cards being purchased. What caused sound cards to decline in favor of integrated sound on the motherboard was improvements in sound support in the operating system. Nowadays, functions like mixing different sound effects together and other functions that were performed by hardware on the sound card are now done by the operating system. By doing this, it reduces the hardware requirement for audio. So, you can understand that the hardware on the motherboard for sound does not need to be that powerful since the operating system is doing most of the work. This may seem like it will be a problem, since we are putting more load on the CPU that could be done by the hardware on a sound card, but due to improvements in CPUs, this translated into less load on the CPU. Put simply, even if you have complex sound being played, including surround sound, on modern CPUs this does not create much load. You can see why, even though integrated sound on the motherboard does not have the same hardware support as a sound card, on modern operating systems it does not need to; this accounts for the decline in the use of sound cards over integrated sound chips. However, there are some benefits to having a sound card. Description too long for YouTube. Please see the following link for the rest of the description. https://itfreetraining.com/ap/2c10 References “The Official CompTIA A+ Core Study Guide (Exam 220-1001)” Chapter 5 Position 184 - 192 “PC speaker” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker “Picture: Large PC Speaker” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PC-Speaker_IMG_8161_(cropped).JPG “Secret of Monkey Island intro sound track” https://store.steampowered.com/app/32360/The_Secret_of_Monkey_Island_Special_Edition/ “Sound Blaster” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster “Sound Blaster Pro” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CT1330A.jpg Credits Trainer: Austin Mason http://ITFreeTraining.com Voice Talent: HP Lewis http://hplewis.com Quality Assurance: Brett Batson http://www.pbb-proofreading.uk