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 SoundBlaster sound cards were primitive, expensive, difficult to install and configure, and poorly supported by the OS and applications. By the early '90s, however, sound cards had become mainstream items that shipped with most PCs. By 2001 most motherboards included at least basic embedded audio.

Properly, the term sound card applies to expansion cards, while sound 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.

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 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 focuses on sound adapters, but because MP3 has become increasingly popular and generates much reader mail, it also covers the basics of MP3—what it is, and how to use it to extract digital audio from CDs and store it on your hard drive in compressed form. The following sections describe what you need to know to choose, install, configure, troubleshoot, and use a sound card effectively.