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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

Pure digital audio and huge hard drives killed them. Back when we were chasing better and better synthesis - FM, wavetable... because playing back CD quality digital audio wasn't possible - you were lucky to have 23kHz mono, or nothing at all, your hard drive was tiny and MP3 wasn't a thing yet... Every sound card upgrade was literally music to your ears.

Now every computer has a little chip that plays back at least CD quality audio from an infinite pool of storage and RAM. Nobody wants to hear MIDI in their games anymore. I'm not even sure what a better sound card could even do for me - reduce line noise, drive high impedance headphones or something. Boring!

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I had a girlfriend who was a musician and back in the late 90s, home recording was rare (but starting to become a thing). We found that the cheapest sound card from a music store had lower noise and better signal-to-noise ratio than even the best (or most expensive) sound card available at computer stores.

For games today, I use the audio interface that came with the computer. For dealing with my synthesizers, I use a Scarlett by Focusrite [0].

[0] - https://focusrite.com/en/scarlett

Yeah, back in that era there were products from Ensoniq and such that weren't popular with PC gamers, but were totally solid hardware for music.

I worked at a CompUSA in high school, and remember a specific white box sound card was frequently sought after by musicians. IIRC it was $15-20

Sometimes they would ask to open the box to see the chips on the board.

I was all about 3D acceleration and didn’t have the money or interest to do anything with audio so I never learned much more about it.

I guess for a few years there might have been a market for hardware MP3 decoders. I faintly remember back when playing MP3s did take a sizeable chunk of CPU time. But after a Moore cycle or two the cost was negligible, and today Spotify probably spends much more CPU on drawing its interface than decoding the audio stream…

And anything I can think of that I'd want a sound card to do these days is being handled by GPUs - like that NVidia AI noise cancellation, where your kids can scream 5 feet away and no one can hear them on Zoom.

Not really on PCs, IMHO. With well optimized software, you could decode in realtime on an i486@100Mhz, a pentium 75 could use winamp and mIRC simultaneously, IIRC. If you didn't have enough CPU to decode mp3, it probably made more sense to upgrade that rather than a mp3 decoder card (if they existed). Mpeg-1/2 (video) decoder cards were more necessary.

Thanks for the flashback. I too remember when playing an MP3 took a good chunk of processor utilization, maybe 40%, and doing too many other things at the same time would cause it to stutter. I also remember when 1080p and 4k were taxing respectively.

The only computer i've ever had with what I consider an acceptable level of line noise was a macbook pro

even a $15 USB-to-dual-3.5mm adapter sounded significantly better on other machines

I experienced this annoying line noise on ASUS, MSI and Dell motherboards

Audio production, I would claim, is the only niche the Macintosh has continually dominated since the first Steve Jobs era.

Even desktop publishing took a turn towards Windows in the mid-late 90s, whether it stayed 'dominant' is a fuzzy question but it was clearly losing market share.

But you won't find a professional music studio without a Mac, this has been true since the late 80s. This is not to say it can't be done with other equipment, just that as a matter of practice it isn't.

I've heard that having your analog audio lines in the same box as a bunch of other high frequency power circuits is usually a recipe for line noise, which is why external DACs can typically provide a better experience.

I have a Sound Blaster something-or-other in my PC but it's not connected to anything these days. I use a tiny Apple headphone dongle that was ~$10, has 0 noise and sounds great.

My friend had a great sound card while I didn't. I remember being jealous of how good midis from vgmusic.com sounded on his machine compared to mine. Night and day.

I used to call the Sierra 800 number and press a key to speak to a representative, just because the hold music consisted of selections of their in-game music played on the Roland MT-32. It sounded amazing compared to my Sound Blaster.

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