What are Audio Drivers?

Audio drivers are important for using a PC for things such as listening to MP3s and music CDs, listening to movies and shows on the computer, and more. Almost every PC currently sold has some type of audio capability, unless it is server class hardware. The system audio device may be included and built into the system motherboard, or there could be an audio card that is plugged into the PCI bus of the system.

Audio from PCs - in the Beginning…

At first, personal computers did not have audio devices installed or built in, other than the very basic speaker which has a connection using two leads that go to the system motherboard. Audio files did not exist at the time, and there were no software programs to play music. The basic speaker set up was used for the Power On Self Test as well as application alerts. There were some developers who designed applications that did allow small amounts of music to be played, but these were not common.

In the early 1990s, it became popular to use consumer grade add-in audio cards, and at first there were devices, including SoundBlaster by Creative Labs, which used eight bit Industry Standard Architecture. These cards were fairly cheap compared to higher end cards becoming available, but they relied on the system CPU for most of the processing for audio and this put a limit on the capabilities of the card, plus made the load bigger for the system. Other companies, including Turtle Beach, were busy with the development of audio cards which were a higher grade, and were intended for musicians and other music professionals.

As technology improved, so did audio drivers and sound cards. Newer sound cards used on-board audio processing CPUs, which removed most of the load from the CPU of the computer, and these cards began to support higher bit rates including thirty two, sixty four, and then one hundred and twenty eight bits. Since the year 2000, multi-channel cards which have the capability of supporting surround sound, and other requirements that have become common.

With Windows systems, audio device access is managed by the operating system. It is impossible for one application to take total control of the audio device, and this makes it possible for multiple applications to simultaneously send output to the audio device installed. This could not be done with DOS or Windows 3.1 systems.

Both Turtle Beach and Creative Labs are still the leading manufacturers of the after-market sound cards available. A lot of motherboards available currently incorporate built-in audio devices that have 5 or 7-channels. PC users have the option available to disable these devices, normally using the BIOS settings, if the user prefers a higher end device instead. Current versions of Windows and Plug-and-Play hardware allows for the automatic detection of any newly installed audio cards on the system, as well as any other peripherals installed. It is normally possible to simply plug in the device and it will function correctly.

There are a large number of different audio drivers available. These include the Delta series, FireWire series, keyboard series, mouse series, USB audio series, the Revolution series, the Legacy series, the Omni series, the Headphone series, the Software series, and many more. The number of audio drivers available can be in the thousands, and it is important to make sure the driver and operating system are compatible when downloading audio drivers for them to function correctly.