Well maybe you do a bit of music making, recording or editing in your spare time like me. If you're serious about your results with this kind of thing you know that the soundcard that came with your computer probably isn't good enough. Granted, these days even the built-in sound on mainboards can do fancy things like surround sound and environmental audio effects. But there are a couple of very good reasons why professional sound cards still exist.
Noise levels are one factor. The average consumer level sound card simply generates too much noise - turn up your speakers without playing anything and you'll probably hear background 'hiss'.
Pro sound cards also tend to have much better options for connectivity, i.e. they give you more choice of what you can connect to them for recording or playback. More importantly, they will have stable drivers that work well in pro audio software. Or at least for most of the people, most of the time....
A couple of years ago I made the switch to a pro level sound card, a well regarded PCI model. It has been mostly reasonably easy to live with, until the last time I reinstalled my entire system. (This tends to happen on a regular basis). Suddenly I was aware that I had two problems with my soundcard that made it difficult to carry on using it. The simpler of them was the fact that I no longer had any control over output volume.
The more complex problem is a relatively common one as regards internal sound cards. Playing back projects in a sequencer program often resulted in pops and clicks and sections of sound going missing. This kind of thing is normally attributed to 'latency' not being right, in other words when the sound card can't keep up with the audio information it is being fed and so drops audio frames. Bizarre as this sounds, if you have a complex track with lots of audio clips in it, this can be tough for the soundcard as it renders every clip individually as you play the whole thing back.
So, back to my problem, and according to the manufacturer of my sound card, if it doesn't have an IRQ less than 15 performance performance takes a nose dive. For those of you who don't remember the dinosaurs, internal computer hardware uses "interupts" (IRQs) to take it's turn getting the attention of the CPU. Before Windows 2000 and XP, it was fairly common to come across conflicts where several devices would try to use an IRQ and end up with one or other unable to function. Great stuff. Fortunately Windows 2000, XP and Vista manage IRQs more effectively and these troubles are now largely unheard of.
Enter the pro sound card.
With the troubleshooting of the two problems taking plenty of my time, I figured the best way forward was to simply abandon my current internal sound card and purchase an external USB sound card. They tend to cost more, but have some worthy advantages. A lot of them have dedicated headphone outputs, complete with level controls. More fundamentally, external sound cards don't use IRQs and so this neatly sidesteps that whole issue.
One thing you notice when you look for sound cards in the online stores is that there are far more external ones than internal ones. I've mentioned there are good reasons to choose external sound cards, but that's just a contributor to a larger trend. More and more, and especially as PCs get smaller, we are seeing add-on upgrades are external boxes rather than bits you open up your computer to swap. Pretty much the only internal thing that people bother upgrading nowadays is the graphics card, thanks to the games 'arms race'.
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