Sound Cards for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Enabling Computers to Play Music and Other Sounds"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Sound cards can also be called audio cards. They are peripheral devices that attach to the ISA or PCI slot on a motherboard and thereby enable a computer to receive and deliver sound. Most sound cards have four sockets for miniature audio jacks: microphone, speaker, line in and line out. Many also have a female 15-pin DB socket that allows you to connect electronic musical instruments.

To play music for you, your computer must have a set of speakers connected. If you want to record music to your computers, you must plug microphones to the sound cards.

Most PCs have a cable running from the CD-ROM drive to the sound card, allowing you to play songs on a CD through your computer. Digital to analog conversion is the function it uses to read a file and produce sound through the speakers.

The reverse is true if you use a computer to record sound, such as the new song your garage band hopes to become an online hit.

All sound cards use analog to digital conversion for that

Also, sound cards act as a synthesizer to generate sounds and a MIDI interface. .midi files tell a computer to play certain instruments a certain way to duplicate a recorded song. Depending on your computer and its capacity, the result may or may not sound like the "real" version of the song -- which means this technology is weak and properly outmoded by the MP3 algorithms.

The three methods sound cards use to produce sound are:

FM (frequency modulation)
Wavetable
Physical modeling

Sound Blaster from Creative Lab is the most well known, though there are many other brands of sound cards.

Advanced sound cards now have 3-D capabilities to create greater depth and sound realism.

A Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection does not require sound cards - the CPU does the processing and the speakers can produce the sound.

Next: Tablet PC

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