Gadgetory

now there are plenty of topics that elicit strong reactions from PC and audio enthusiasts but few come close to is it worth it to shell out the cash on a sound card or external audio interface so why does this debate stir up such passion and emotion on both sides who are sound cards for and what advantages do they really provide let's start this with an analogy think of the electrical signals traveling through the inside of your PC like cars on a highway if you're out there driving around all by yourself it's going to be pretty peaceful and quiet unless you souped up your engine to make some sort of statement about the size of your junk but as more and more cars get on that highway the ambient noise level is going to go up well the situation inside your computer is much more similar to the busy highway than the lonely one your CPU is processing millions of instructions per second and all that data flowing around on the motherboard makes it a very noisy place and if you turn on your speakers you might actually even be able to hear it all that extra electrical noise from inside the computer can manifest itself as hissing cracking and other distortions over your speakers or headphones when you're trying to listen to music watch Netflix or blow away that friggin annoying kid that keeps headshotting you through the wall somehow motherboard manufacturers have a few different ways of addressing this problem the most elegant of which is to place the audio circuitry on a dedicated area of the PCB away from the other components however this solution is quite expensive to implement so it's mostly only straight ball and boards that have this feature discreet sound cards are basically a more robust version of this and can be added to any motherboard they put all the audio signaling on a completely separate PCB that attaches via PCI or PCI Express and it comes with some additional advantages as well such as the capability for more inputs and outputs more powerful application to drive those fancy-pants headphones of yours cleaner digital to analog conversion for more detailed sound and of course the ability to carry it forward to your next system when you upgrade the rest of your hardware but sound cards are hardly a perfect solution they're still near the EMI noise inside you PC tower their software drivers can be problematic and due to their nature as all-in-one solutions their DAC or amp or both are not always the best enter external Dax these usually require no drivers and take the audio processing out of the noisy environment of your PC case altogether allowing a cleaner analog signal to be sent to an amplifier that is either built-in to your speakers or bought separately even though Dax built-in to even onboard integrated sound cards are better than ever having a dedicated one that sits outside the case safe for me mi is something that many folks who are passionate about audio absolutely swear by but Linus you still haven't actually answered the $64,000 question who are these products actually for well for one sound producers if you make music instead of just listening to it you might need more inputs and outputs than your onboard sound solution can give you which is usually just a complement of three-and-a-half millimeter jacks in an optical Toslink port for two if you're super serial about getting the absolute most out of your fancy speakers or headphones especially high impedance or low sensitivity ones that are difficult to drive an onboard audio upgrade with particular attention to the amplifier might be necessary for hearing the finest details of whatever you're listening to and finally and perhaps most obviously if you keep hearing noticeable hissing Distortion or just plain muddy audio quality then you'll definitely want to look into moving away from your onboard sound unless of course you enjoy listening to everything as if it was recorded on a cassette tape that's been traveling around the cosmos for the last 20-something years speaking of carrying around audio recordings with you an audible calm membership is the perfect thing for you if you want to have access to literally hundreds of thousands of high-quality audio books like gone girl by Gillian Flynn which I absolutely kicks butt by the way I love this book and I'm planning to go see the movie as soon as I possibly can but have a baby but I'll get to it as I'm boy because I can't get enough of it an audible membership gets you one audio book of your choice to listen to in the car or at work or wherever it is you do that every month and gets you discounts on additional audiobooks if you crave lore and the best part is that the first one is absolutely free so head over to audible.com slash tech wiki to sign up and get started thanks for watching guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible also leave a comment if you have any feedback on this particular script our new guy actually wrote it so if you think that he sucks then make sure you let him know in the comments and as always guys don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this from tech quickie I never say that that's an outro for a different channel that I do forget it subscribe if you haven't already