>Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card.
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.
The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:
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/PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards.
2. Gamers who want 3d/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.
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.
Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask "is this creative 3d? aureal?" nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).
No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC for recording
USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my own limited experience. This comes into play when doing music keyboard recording.
eg. I found it difficult to find a USB MIDI adapter that didn't introduce unacceptable latency (when trying to record new tracks synced in real time to existing ones). Edirol was recommended to me but even after tweaking settings for hours it fell short. I wound up buying a second-hand Creative X-Fi Elite Pro PCIe card and love it.
Usually the software using the interface (pro tools / ableton) has settings to tweak audio latency via buffer size for audio. I have not had issue with this or midi, and I record a fair amount. Motu makes a good cheap audio usb-c interface.
> USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my own limited experience.
This may be true but I've never had latency issues with USB soundcards. Right now I have a Line6 Helix Floor unit that I use to play guitar with. I can route the audio through the Helix effects, into Logic and back to Helix for more post-processing and have no latency problems.
I have had other brands and models and none introduced perceivable latency.
I don't use MIDI but I doubt it requires less latency than live guitar playing.
I had a PCIe soundcard a few years ago that made it almost impossible to get rid of ground hum though.
I also have latency issues with USB soundcards and MIDI devices, specifically. Tried multiple vendors and in each one introduced ~100-200 milliseconds of delay. The old PCI SoundBlaster Audigy card I had 20 years ago with a the standard DIN MIDI interface was orders of magnitude better, even running Windows XP.
MIDI latency is a pain in the ass, audio latency is negligible with any USB soundcard I've used, buffer sizes and latency compensation in DAWs matter. Adjusting your MIDI timing to compensate the jittery of MIDI on a PC is also important.
Or get an external MIDI clock like the E-RM Multiclock and never bother about MIDI latency issues. Audio is completely fine, 30-50μs of latency won't ever be perceptible to humans, the latency of MIDI will.
This is emphatically not true for USB interfaces in general.
In particular, the first readily available set of benchmark results I was able to find[1] suggest the difference in audio (not MIDI) latency between the lowest-latency PCIe cards and the listed USB devices (RME Fireface UFX+ USB3 and RME Babyface Pro [USB2]) is under a millisecond.
While I couldn't find similar results for MIDI I/O, it seems unlikely that either of these USB devices' MIDI interfaces would introduce an order of magnitude more latency than their audio counterparts.
USB is purely pooled by the host, no Bus Mastering, no DMA. Bunch of frequent interrupts (125us uSOF) that need to be handled by the CPU. USB 2.0 is so heavy its mere presence in a computer (idle pooling something plugged in) visibly slows down any <1GHz computer (halving IDE transfers for example https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=89651). Users didnt notice because 2.0 started showing up in 2002 together with >2GHz CPUs.
For playing older games that relied on that hardware, sure soundfonts aren't a great replacement. But modern games moved away from needing to use a soundcard audio engine and are just able to completely do it on the CPU, and the only real benefit of the soundcard at that point is the latency/dac/amp
I have sub 5ms latency with my RME sound card, could probably go lower. What will hurt after a long while is the bandwidth at 192khz plus some other protocol on top (clock syncing, midi…). But we’re speaking of more than 64 channel in AND out.
So USB is pretty good, and for most sound card, USB2 is enough. Otherwise you can go Thunderbolt, which offer on par experience with PCIe.
What a consumer sound card offer now a day is better dac compare to the one of your motherboard or better output for headset.
> Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers
...in part because there's no way to do that, and if you do it by using the headphone jack, in addition to low quality you're also going to get all system sounds
Maybe I am self selecting, but I don't think I have seen a desktop computer or motherboard in the last 15 years without spidf over toslink or RCA. Hell, for that matter a bunch of laptops and even apple until recently included mini toslink/optical out the headphone jack.
I've got an ancient Yamaha 5.1 receiver with no HDMI. I'm sending it audio from a Raspberry Pi4 behind my screen through a cheap USB 7.1 audio card using regular RCA connectors. The extra 2 channels are duplicates of the stereo input (using pulseaudio) and get sent to a stereo amp that goes to 4 ceiling speakers in the adjoining room. I've found that far more reliable than spdif. For example, I can download all of the Dolby test files (including their latest Atmos stuff) and I get 5.1 audio from my old receiver. Using spdif I don't.
I can tell that analog-only motherboard audio is very common even if it doesn't make sense. This was the biggest filter when I was selecting my motherboard, limited the available options just to a handful (within reasonably priced boards, expensive top end of course has all bells and whistles).
This might be due to computers and headphones becoming portable. When I was a kid my PC had a soundblaster connected to a hacky 7.1 setup in my room, and counterstrike supported it.
Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card.
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.
The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:
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/PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards.
2. Gamers who want 3d/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.
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.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Surround_sound
Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask "is this creative 3d? aureal?" nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).