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.
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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.
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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.
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