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A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.
Sound quality is typically an assessment of the accuracy, fidelity, or intelligibility of audio output from an electronic device. Quality can be measured objectively, such as when tools are used to gauge the accuracy with which the device reproduces an original sound; or it can be measured subjectively, such as when human listeners respond to ...
In addition to PCI and PCIe internal sound cards, Creative also released an external USB-based solution (named X-Mod) in November 2006. X-Mod is listed in the same category as the rest of the X-Fi lineup, but is only a stereo device, marketed to improve music playing from laptop computers, and with lower specifications than the internal offerings.
This allowed for a much wider selection of, and longer playing, samples. It also included higher quality sound output at all levels, quadrophonic output, and a new MIDI synthesizer with 64 sampled voices. The Live! was introduced on August 11, 1998 [1] and variations on the design remained Creative's primary sound card line into the early 2000's.
YMF7x4 cards shipped with a 2 MB bank of 8-bit samples by default, which must be loaded into system RAM during booting. Neither the resolution nor content of the sample bank are hardware limitations. A user can load their own banks using third-party tools to further improve sound quality or completely change the set of instruments. [2]
A big improvement in the X-Fi DSP over the previous Audigy design, is the complete overhaul of the resampling engine on the card. The previous Audigy cards had their DSPs locked at 48 kHz/16-bit, meaning any content that didn't match this format had to be resampled on the card in hardware, which resulted in serious intermodulation distortion.