I'm curious about Sound Cards. All computers have ability to record sounds and play without sound card. As I hear we need to buy good sound card for good quality of recoding. Does this mean the motherboard designer or the audio chip of the motherboard designer (like realtek) do not have more knowledge about recording good quality sound? So we buy sound card to bypass these poor audio recordig or A to D chips?

 

It depends on the mobo. General purpose units require basic sound for YouTube and streaming Pandora etc. Most decent mobos have an integrated RealTek sound system or something comparable that does a good job for many audio applications including recording. I know lots of guys who do recording using just the mobo with RealTek sound built in and it does fine. For professional recording, you'd probably want to investigate something better but for most uses, you usually can get a mobo with a good sound chip - check the specs.

Have fun!

 

Built in sound card is still a sound card.

 

Does this mean the motherboard designer or the audio chip of the motherboard designer (like realtek) do not have more knowledge about recording good quality sound?

I would say it's not necessarily knowledge that's the issue, just price. For basic recording capability cheap parts are fine, but if you want the best signal to noise ratio, flattest frequency response, etc. the components cost a lot more money. It doesn't make sense to put the absolute best parts in every board, making them much more expensive, when most people won't know or care.

 

Think about it like a microphone.
You can buy a mic for a couple of dollars. If they were really good, there would be no market for those mics that cost hundreds of dollars.
Similarly, you may find the sound card on the MB will do what you want, but a good external sound card moves the analog amps away from the high noise MB, and can often use better A/D converters, resulting in more useable dynamic range, lower noise and distortion.
Saying all that, I use the MB sound card and am happy with the results.

 

I use the MB sound card and am happy with the results.

Hi but the MB I have is the most worse MB in the world for recording and playing. If I plugged headphone, it plays extremly low level sound which do not have low frequency bass. I tried with many different operating systems and found that the sound section of the MB is very bad. I bought a $1.8 usb sound card and it's good than before. I don' want to write the name of the poor MB here. Which MB you use and how much you paid for the MB?

you usually can get a mobo with a good sound chip - check the specs.

Hi, reading spec of the MB is confusing to me. It has many specs about processor, RAMs, Graphics, storage etc. Please can you post a good set of audio spec of any one MB?

 

I probably didn't explain that too well.

I have an older (2009) Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 mobo with a RealTek ALC889 codec on board. It is spec'd for 2.1, 5.1 and 7.1 Hi-Definition Audio with Dolby Home Theater support and optical IO for digital audio. It's old stuff compared to what you can get today but the point is as you pay more for a mobo, you can get better peripherals. This one wasn't particularly cheap ($150-$200?) when I bought it and I didn't buy it for the audio. But the money was well spent. It has performed flawlessly. The audio was a bonus since I didn't buy the board for that specifically. I get some good sounding jazz out of it with a 2.1 speaker system and can record tracks from guitar pre-amps, microphones or capture sound from whatever I'm playing at the time. I usually don't like the sound I get but it's because I suck as a guitarist , the audio is fine.

Keep in mind that a typical sound card is intended to drive some sort of amplified speakers and will have limited tone controls. Mine has some presets in software (rock, club etc.) but I have an external equalizer. Absent any equalization settings in the software, the output tone is going to be pretty flat and you'll need to get some amplification, equalization and/or better headphones. I would suspect you could find a higher end sound card or even a better mobo unit might have more controls - as I said, I didn't buy mine for the sound specifically.

But you might indeed just have a crummy sound unit on your particular mobo. If you are into computer audio, I'd check out reviews on places like https://www.tomshardware.com/ or just google 'best motherboard audio' or 'best sound card for recording'.
Game and home theater oriented stuff will have the audio you want.

Have fun!

EDIT: just for you, I googled 'best motherboard audio' and lots came up. I chose this and then googled the Realtek ALC892 listed in the specs. That brought up lots of reviews and alternate choices. If you decide to upgrade, poke around to see who leans towards good audio.

 

I use a Mac so the sound is pretty good I feel.
If you MB output level is low, it is probably not designed to drive the headphones but, as JohnInTX mentioned, an external amplifier. Try running an amp to drive your headphones or speakers. Line level out is higher impedance than headphones and the coupling caps are not large enough to give good bass response into headphones I suspect.