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Modern sound cards may provide more flexible audio accelerator capabilities which can be used in support of higher levels of polyphony or other purposes such as hardware acceleration of 3D sound, positional audio and real-time DSP effects. In this case, typically, the card is only capable of two channels of digital sound and the polyphony specification solely applies to the number of MIDI instruments the sound card is capable of producing at once. In the early days of wavetable synthesis, some sound card manufacturers advertised polyphony solely on the MIDI capabilities alone.
#Stereo mix plus serial software
This is similar to the way inexpensive softmodems perform modem tasks in software rather than in hardware.

These devices may provide more than two sound output channels (typically 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound), but they usually have no actual hardware polyphony for either sound effects or MIDI reproduction – these tasks are performed entirely in software.

Modern low-cost integrated sound cards (i.e., those built into motherboards) such as audio codecs like those meeting the AC'97 standard and even some lower-cost expansion sound cards still work this way.
#Stereo mix plus serial full
The full capabilities of advanced cards are often not fully used only one (mono) or two ( stereo) voice(s) and channel(s) are usually dedicated to playback of digital sound samples, and playing back more than one digital sound sample usually requires a software downmix at a fixed sampling rate.
#Stereo mix plus serial Pc
Later cards, such as the AdLib sound card, had a 9-voice polyphony combined in 1 mono output channel.Įarly PC sound cards had multiple FM synthesis voices (typically 9 or 16) which were used for MIDI music. For example, much older sound chips could accommodate three voices, but only one output audio channel (i.e., a single mono output), requiring all voices to be mixed together.

Sometimes, the terms voice and channel are used interchangeably to indicate the degree of polyphony, not the output speaker configuration. These distinct channels are seen as the number of audio outputs, which may correspond to a speaker configuration such as 2.0 (stereo), 2.1 (stereo and sub woofer), 5.1 (surround), or other configurations. The card may use direct memory access to transfer the samples to and from main memory, from where a recording and playback software may read and write it to the hard disk for storage, editing, or further processing.Ĩ-channel DAC Cirrus Logic CS4382 placed on Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1tyĪn important sound card characteristic is polyphony, which refers to its ability to process and output multiple independent voices or sounds simultaneously. Some cards include a sound chip to support the production of synthesized sounds, usually for real-time generation of music and sound effects using minimal data and CPU time. In either case, the sound card uses an analog-to-digital converter to digitize this signal. Most sound cards have a line in connector for an analog input from a sound source that has higher voltage levels than a microphone. Input through a microphone connector can be used, for example, by speech recognition or voice over IP applications. Ī common external connector is the microphone connector. The output signal is connected to an amplifier, headphones, or external device using standard interconnects, such as a TRS phone connector. Sound cards use a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), which converts recorded or generated digital signal data into an analog format. Sound cards are also used for computer-based communication such as voice over IP and teleconferencing.Ĭlose-up of a sound card PCB, showing electrolytic capacitors, SMT capacitors and resistors, and a YAC512 two-channel 16-bit DAC Typical uses of sound cards or sound card functionality include providing the audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition, editing video or audio, presentation, education and entertainment (games) and video projection. Sound processing hardware is also present on modern video cards with HDMI to output sound along with the video using that connector previously they used a S/PDIF connection to the motherboard or sound card. The integrated sound system is often still referred to as a sound card. Sound functionality can also be integrated onto the motherboard, using components similar to those found on plug-in cards.
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The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.

