USB sound card: better than a dedicated one?

Are a USB sound card on the same level as an internal one? Before answering this question, we must know that sound is a great pillar in the use of our equipment. Without being a truly necessary element for the proper functioning of this, sound is the ingredient in charge of spicing up the experience of using multiple applications, programs, or multimedia content.

This weight is especially remarkable in certain professional sectors, such as music production, or very passionate, such as video games. All this transforms the sound of our equipment and, especially, the ability to improve it, into a claim. Something these users are interested in investing in.

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Sound investment involves sound cards

And this investment necessarily goes through the sound cards. Small pieces of dedicated hardware, focused on improving sound quality with respect to the integrated solutions found today on almost any computer.

Image: Flickr, Antii - Gravis Ultrasound

Sound cards are a piece of hardware with a long history, which usually means that it is also a piece that can be presented in many formats. Of all these formats, the most common today revolve around how the card is connected to our equipment, there are two great alternatives: the internal sound card (commonly called dedicated), or the one that is outside our tower (external), usually connected via a USB interface.

All sound cards belong to the same family

When we talk about sound cards, it is common to make a mental simile with other components, such as graphics cards, and think of internal sound cards. But the reality is that the term serves to designate indiscriminately all hardware dedicated to the sound of our equipment.

These similarities do not end there, removing the special functionalities that we can find in the audio interfaces, which are nothing more than another type of external sound card, the functionalities between all of them are similar and depend entirely on the model of the card itself.

Thus, the terms "external" or "internal" are just labels to differentiate the different formats of the same component, so choosing one format over the other depends, almost entirely, on our personal preferences and the accompanying software.

So are they exactly the same?

Despite the fact that the term is used for the two formats that we refer to in this text, there are small differences between the two proposals, which have a lot to do with the interferences in the sound and the energy supplied.

Internal sound cards can experience some level of interference when they are inside the computer. These interferences or "noise" in the sound can derive from not separating the circuitry and connectors from the rest of the components, or from a very intensive use of the PCIe ports of our equipment.

The advantages of external sound cards

External graphics cards, on the other hand, when found outside our tower and powered by other means, do not usually suffer from this type of problem. This is one of the reasons why audio interfaces are eminently external.

Image: Flickr, Danny Choo

For a non-professional user, this is not a big problem, since the headphones and speakers that they normally use do not need a large amperage to function correctly and this noise is more noticeable with equipment that requires a greater amplification of the sound, but In the case of professional users, or those with high-end sound equipment, it can affect the sound.

All is not lost for internal sound cards

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Protection at the inputs and outputs of a modern internal card.

However, we should bear in mind that having the external sound card involves dealing with cables, connections and other necessities that delimit the space on our desk, so they may not be an option for those looking to save every inch. In addition, they usually have a price higher than an internal equivalent.

Currently, most internal sound cards have a good shielding between connectors, capacitors and the like, which ensure that these components do not suffer from noise problems in such a marked way. So, thanks to their more adjusted price and greater wealth of features, they have reappeared regularly in the market as one more option when it comes to improving the sound of our equipment.