Everything You Need to Know About Your Computer Sound Adapter (Card)

Your computer's ability to produce sound - however good or bad - is entirely dependent on a piece of hardware, sometimes available as a separately installed adapter called the sound card or sound adapter, and sometimes integrated as an additional set of chips on your motherboard. But that sound hardware, regardless of whether it's a separate adapter or integrator, performs an incredible number of jobs.

Major Functions of the Sound Adapter

From a user's perspective, there are four major responsibilities borne by the sound adapter:

- To record audio from external devices (example: microphone or from a taped source) and then save this in a supported audio media format
- To playback pre-recorded sound
- To process existing sounds
- To provide sound synthesis capability

Components of Recent Sound Adapters

As you already know, today's typical sound adapter isn't really just one device that exists to push sound out from a signal of information generated from the CPU. Instead, it's a collection of devices, plus connections for attaching yet more devices, that bring sound into the adapter and convert it into a signal understandable by the PC, transmit sound out through the speakers or headphones, or work with musical or other add-on devices such as MIDI keyboards, microphones, and gaming hardware.

Let's look at some of the components here, and then examine them more closely by taking each part individually.

The components typically seen are:

-Digital Signal Processor (DSP) or more simplified on-board processor
-Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC)
-Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC)
-Sample rate generator
-Amplifier (optional, a legacy from the days on non-amplified speakers requiring the sound adapter to have an amplifier to push and magnify sound)
-Memory (either ROM or Flash)
- Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) connection
- Jacks for various connections (speakers, line in/line out, microphone, sometimes headphones)
- Game port

More about the core components - DSP, converters, sample rate generator, and MIDI connectivity - follows.

Digital Signal Processor (DSP)