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 ...

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 just inserted an Asus Xonar SE ($69) sound card. It works in a new Intel i5-12400 boxen. I spend enough time in the office to listen to sound and music through a more than decent Yamaha / Dynaudio ...