<story><title>Ask HN: Whatever happened to dedicated sound cards?</title><text>During the &amp;#x27;90s and the early &amp;#x27;00s, dedicated soundcards were in-demand components in much the same way GPUs are today. From what I know, Creative won, on-board sound became good enough sometime between Windows XP and Windows 7, and the audio enthusiasts moved on to external DACs and $2000 headphones. Today Creative still sells soundcards, but none of them appear to be substantial improvements over previous models.&lt;p&gt;So what other reasons could have caused the decline in interest? Was there nothing that could be improved upon? Were there improvements on the software side that made hardware redundant and&amp;#x2F;or useless? Is there any other company besides Creative, however large or small, still holding the torch for innovating in this space?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>speeder</author><text>The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn&amp;#x27;t because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.&lt;p&gt;When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.&lt;p&gt;But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...&lt;p&gt;After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.&lt;p&gt;Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.&lt;p&gt;Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.&lt;p&gt;As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joe91</author><text>This is nonsense.  The main reason behind the demise of dedicated sound cards: motherboard sound chipsets got &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot;.  The value add wasn&amp;#x27;t adding enough value any more because you can get decent sound quality just by using the default sound output provided by your motherboard.&lt;p&gt;3D sound and other processing got baked into middleware for games because it became trivial to do all of the processing in software - and the processing became more advanced than anything that the sound card vendors were offering (and they didn&amp;#x27;t move quickly enough anyway).&lt;p&gt;Pro audio vastly progressed past anything that is possible to provide in fixed silicon.  For input, dedicated USB (and ethernet) audio interfaces progressed to the point where it would be ridiculous to provide such functionality on a general &amp;quot;sound card&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just evolution - there just isn&amp;#x27;t a compelling enough niche for a dedicated sound card any more.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Whatever happened to dedicated sound cards?</title><text>During the &amp;#x27;90s and the early &amp;#x27;00s, dedicated soundcards were in-demand components in much the same way GPUs are today. From what I know, Creative won, on-board sound became good enough sometime between Windows XP and Windows 7, and the audio enthusiasts moved on to external DACs and $2000 headphones. Today Creative still sells soundcards, but none of them appear to be substantial improvements over previous models.&lt;p&gt;So what other reasons could have caused the decline in interest? Was there nothing that could be improved upon? Were there improvements on the software side that made hardware redundant and&amp;#x2F;or useless? Is there any other company besides Creative, however large or small, still holding the torch for innovating in this space?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>speeder</author><text>The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn&amp;#x27;t because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.&lt;p&gt;When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.&lt;p&gt;But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...&lt;p&gt;After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.&lt;p&gt;Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.&lt;p&gt;Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.&lt;p&gt;As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rocket_surgeron</author><text>&amp;gt;Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.&lt;p&gt;Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card.&lt;p&gt;Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2.&lt;p&gt;The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:&lt;p&gt;1. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI&amp;#x2F;PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards.&lt;p&gt;2. Gamers who want 3d&amp;#x2F;positional audio either use headphones, find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use case in the gaming world for sound cards.&lt;p&gt;Dolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for surround audio nowadays. Decent positional audio can be experienced using a laptop and headphones-- no sound card required.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pcgamingwiki.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Glossary:Surround_sound&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pcgamingwiki.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Glossary:Surround_sound&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask &amp;quot;is this creative 3d? aureal?&amp;quot; nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC&amp;#x27;s onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).</text></comment>