I fired up TweetDeck this morning and found a tweet from Jobney asking if he should bother with a sound card for an upcoming gaming PC he’s building, particularly since he’s just using 2.1 audio.

It turns out not to be such a simple question.

The short answer is no. You really don’t need sound cards for gaming. But there may be reasons you’d still want one. To understand this, we need to look at why sound cards came to pass originally.

The first IBM PCs had no real audio capability, just a tiny speaker driven by a tone generator that could only generate one tone at a time. It was shrill and annoying. Other systems, like the Amiga and Atari computers, had much better (for the time) sound capabilities.

So the sound card was created. First, there was the Adlib Music Synthesizer. Later, Singapore-based Creative Technology shipped the Creative Music System, which begat the original Sound Blaster. The Adlib garnered some game support, but it was really just an FM synthesizer, which meant you couldn’t use digitized dialog. The Sound Blaster changed all that. Eventually, there were a slew of competing sound cards, some useful, some terrible. The Sound Blaster, though, became the de facto standard among DOS game developers.

As audio became more important in games, game developers began bumping up against the limits of the PC. Developers wanted more sophisticated effects in real time, but the Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16 and competitors were generally software based. CPUs at the time weren’t beefy enough to handle everything the game needed to do plus multiple, real-time generated sound streams. Sound cards began incorporating DSPs (digital signal processors) to offload audio processing from CPUs.

Through competition, really stupid business decisions by competitors and litigation, Creative eventually emerged as the last man standing in the sound card business. There were (and still are) lesser competitors, but they were dwarfed by the Creative juggernaut.

Then Windows gaming became important. DirectX (and hence, DirectSound) and hardware abstraction layers, coupled with increasingly sophisticated use of audio by developers, meant that drivers became important. Drivers – those bits of software that allow software to talk to hardware – were never Creative’s strong suit. The Audigy and Audigy 2 sound card products suffered from numerous driver issues.

When the Windows Vista development process got under way, Microsoft took a look at all the problem reports generated by customer calls, and discovered that a substantial plurality consisted of users running into issues with hardware accelerated audio. Every support call is money down the drain. They also took a look at Intel’s and AMD’s plans for CPU development. High clock rates and, eventually, multicore processors, would become commonplace. So Redmond made a business decision: support for hardware accelerated audio was removed from the OS.

Today, the only way games or other apps can take advantage of hardware accelerated audio is through external APIs, like OpenAL. Creative did clean up their act with the X-Fi line of sound cards. It’s been my experience that X-Fi drivers are notably more robust than Audigy drivers. But the effort was really too little, too late.

Quite a few game developers have taken advantage of OpenAL, but the era when a sound card was a must-have is now past. Creative Labs has adapted to the new era of multicore processing by developing software versions of the X-Fi, which you can find on a number of motherboards and some laptop PCs. If you desire some of the features of the X-Fi, such as EAX 4.0 support, then soft X-Fi is a good solution.

Soft X-Fi for Asus Motherboards on the left; X-Fi PCIe on the right.

So why buy a sound card today?

Ironically, the issue is drivers. Codecs – those bits of hardware that convert digital audio to analog and vice versa – are still essential, unless you attach to an external device (such as an AV receiver) via digital audio output. Even dumb codecs require drivers.

Like all commodity hardware, there’s been something of a shakeout in the audio codec market. These tiny chips are dirt cheap, so the profit margins are small. Major players, like Analog Devices, have bailed on an increasingly unprofitable business. This leaves companies like Realtek and C-Media to take up the slack. My own experience with Realtek and C-Media drivers on Vista is that they were actually worse than Creative Labs drivers.

Realtek is by far the most common purveyor of integrated audio condecs on motherboards, though you see Via and C-Media fairly often. Here in the basement lab, gaming systems running on integrated audio often generate noisy, crackly audio. We’ve also run into games crashing due to issues with drivers, particularly Realtek drivers.

The good news is that the Realtek drivers seem to have improved with the Windows 7 RC. We’ve seen far fewer problems since installing the Windows 7 RC on the gaming systems here.

So do you need a sound card today? With Windows 7, I’m cautiously optimistic that you don’t need a discrete sound card. But I haven’t really exercised multichannel real-time audio with Windows 7 and the various hardware codecs yet.

Then there’s the whole issue of motherboard design. Audio is often added as an afterthought, so lower cost motherboards often have noisy, distorted audio, so a discrete sound card often fixes those types of problems. So for now, I tend to prefer motherboards with soft X-Fi, or use a PCI Express X-Fi card from Creative or Auzentech. If a motherboard implements soft X-Fi, I assume some though has been put into the layout and design of the audio signal paths. But then, I’ve always been an optimist.

The tea leaves say, however, that the time of the sound card for consumer PCs is fading into history. It’s only a matter of time.

I almost never use any of these. I must wear the hubcap of shame.

These are undeniably useful devices. You can get content from your PC or network attached storage device into your living room. What type of hardware you use depends on what you want to accomplish. People who just want music around the home (and can drop a grand or more) will get Sonos gear. If they want to stream video from their PC to their HDTV, they might get a media center extender, whether it’s a Windows Media Center Extender, Apple TV, or other similar piece of hardware.

If you really want a repository for your audio CD and photo collection, or want to store all those ripped DVDs, then a home theater PC is a good bet. It’s pretty easy to build (or buy) a relatively quiet HTPC that can get the job done.

But I rarely use them.

There are a number of reasons for this, and I suspect I’m not alone.

First, I’m not a big consumer of media. Most of my music listening occurs when I’m driving around in my car, for example. I’ll watch TV recorded on the Dish DVR with the family on occasion. Sometimes I’ll pop a movie into the Sony BDP-S350. About the closest thing I get to using media center style feautures is when we use Netflix streaming on the Xbox 360. This is perhaps the single biggest reason. My entertainment comes from reading books (*gasp*), gaming (PC, board games and RPGs) and related activities.

Second, I’m lazy. The DVR just works. The Blu-ray player just works. I don’t need to boot a PC. I’ve also got all the standard devices (including the 360) programmed into the Harmony One remote.

Third, I’ve never settled on a device that does everything I want. For example, I’ve got a Logitech Squeezebox Duet. The Duet is a nice unit, but requires some piece of hardware — a PC or supported NAS drive — to be running SlimServer. Firing up the Xbox 360 as a Windows Media Center extender also means that my PC needs to be turned on. The plethora of competing formats and streaming methods still makes all this less straightforward than it needs to be.

I’ve tried Sonos gear. The Sonos stuff is slick — but Sonos doesn’t do Windows Media Lossless, which is how I rip most of my music collection.

So what happens is I set up the Squeezebox several times a year, whenever I host a party or barbecue, and fire up a playlist. That’s about the only time I use this gear in a practical way.

On the other hand, I frequently tinker with digital media adapters, HTPCs and related gear. I’m still fascinated by the concept of trying to get easy access to all media, all the time, anywhere in my house. But actually leaving something set up and living with it… not so much.