What Is the Function of a Sound Card?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to tell you a little bit about the function of a sound card. A sound card is the little chip that's inside your computer that's tasked with controlling output of sound as well as the processing of digital sound and the input of sound from external sources. Now, on my laptop here, you'll see I have three jacks on the front, one is for a microphone, the other is for speakers, and the other is for a line in from some kind of audio device like a stereo system or something like that. If I take a little eighth of an inch plug like this one and I plug it into the ones for my headphones here, the sound card is going to take all of the sound that it processes and it's going to send it out that headphone jack to my headphones. Now the sound card is what is built into the computer that controls that. Now, it also, as you see my laptop has speakers up here at the top, the sound card also controls sending data to those speakers to generate sound that we're used to listening to. Now, if I pull up on my computer the volume mixer, by clicking on the little horn here and pull up the sound control here for my audio. This is basically my main interface to my sound card built into my computer and it's basically going to show me here the level of sound that's being output by the card. As you can see when it does a little ding a little green bar kind of appears at the bottom to show that there's a level of sound occurring there. So basically the sound card is designed to process input and to output sound in a computer. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just told you a little bit about the function of a sound card."