If these were the early 2000s. We would have said that having a sound card is a flex. With good reason, too. You'd slap one into your PC, crank up a media player, and pretend you were mastering audio.

I've read a lot of stuff about this going both ways. Thought I'd ask here in case anybody can give me more insight. Basically, some people seem to say, "Unless you're a professional sound engineer, ...

Sound hardware has been built into PC motherboards for so long now it’s difficult to remember the days when a sound card was an expensive add-on peripheral. By the mid to late 1990s they were ...