HardwareZone's 10th Anniversary Special
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10 Years in PC Audio
10 Years in PC Audio
It's strange to see how our audio needs have evolved over the last ten years; while 1998 and 1999 saw a slew of sound cards in the market for discerning audiophiles and for our review labs, the next few years saw a much quieter (pardon the pun) sound card market with the much more convenient on-board sound solutions being found on the motherboard. While it was often commented upon that these on-board sound solutions lacked the sound quality found on discrete solutions, they were much cheaper and did the job decently.
It was therefore no surprise to find that the once plentiful market of sound cards has devolved into a quieter one dominated by Creative Technologies with their introduction of their Sound Blaster Audigy series in 2001 and their Sound Blaster X-Fi in 2004. Competitors were rare and hard to find, though in recent years, some attempts have been made to compete in the market from ASUS with their introduction of their Xonar range of sound cards, specialists like Auzentech and a few others. These are mostly aimed the at the professional-consumers and audiophiles who don't mind spending more on dedicated sound cards that usually offer better connectivity options that are of better quality and better signal to noise ratio (SNR) specifications among others that try to ensure better audio reproduction than onboard solutions.
However, onboard audio has been making greater inroads to the mainstream consumer group ever since the introduction of Intel's High Definition Audio standard in 2004 that featured higher quality multi-channel playback as compared to the older AC97 standard that was often shunned in the older days of onboard audio. These days it's not rare to find most standard systems relying on onboard sound for all audio needs though dedicated gamers and audiophiles will probably still spend that little bit more for a discrete sound solution.
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