Chapter 17. Sound Adapters
Because no one envisioned sound as a
business necessity, the only provision early PCs made for sound was a
$0.29 speaker driven by a square-wave generator to produce beeps,
boops, and clicks sufficient for prompts and warnings. Reproducing
speech or music was out of the question. Doing that required an
add-on sound card, and those were quick to arrive on the market as
people began playing games on their PCs. The early AdLib and Creative
Sound Blaster sound cards were primitive, expensive, difficult to
install and configure, and poorly supported by the OS and
applications. By the early 1990s, however, sound cards had become
mainstream items that shipped with most PCs. By 2001 most
motherboards included at least basic embedded audio, and by 2003 it
was difficult to find a mainstream system or motherboard without good
built-in audio.
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Properly, the term sound card applies to
expansion cards, while sound adapter or
audio adapter applies to any component used to
provide PC audio, whether as an expansion card or as a device
embedded on the motherboard. But like most people, we use these terms
interchangeably.
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With a sound adapter and appropriate
software, a PC can perform various tasks, including:
Playing audio CDs, either directly or
from compressed digital copies of the CD soundtracks stored as MP3 or
Ogg Vorbis files on your hard disk Playing stereo music, sound effects, and/or voice prompts in
games, education, training, and presentation software, as well as for
operating system prompts, warnings, and other events Capturing dictation to a document file,
adding voice annotations to documents, or controlling applications
using voice/speech recognition software Supporting audio conferencing and telephony across a LAN or the
Internet Supporting
text-to-speech software that allows the PC to
"read" text aloud, aiding children
who cannot read and people who are visually impaired Creating and playing back music using
MIDI software and hardware
This chapter describes what you need to know to choose,
install, configure, troubleshoot, and use a sound card effectively.
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