Honestly, most of the mid-range PC motherboards give a good enough sound output that one won’t require a separate cheap music system unless they want to disturb the neighbours.
I make do with my monitors’ speakers, which are pretty cheap. And when I care about sound quality, just use my headphones (which is the only audio thing I put a lot of money on) and having higher fidelity room speakers won’t even help me due to the traffic noise all day.
Monitor speakers are so awful, you can get a big improvement by spending $20 on a set of cheap PC speakers, which you can improve on more with a $100 soundbar.
Just due to the nature of how sound works, you need at least a certain amount of space for your divers and monitors are optimized to take up as little space as possible (over the screen itself). A lot of monitor speakers don’t even drive the sound towards you and sound like whatever is playing was recorded in a tin can.
Drive the speakers from your motherboard, you’re right that it can handle outputting signals that most people couldn’t even tell the difference between that and an expensive sound system (and those who say they can would surprise me if they could consistently do so in a blind test), but going from monitor speakers to dedicated speakers is one of the cheapest and most effective upgrades you can do with a PC IMO.
As I said, when I care about sound, I would just use my expensive headphones.
Just for hearing notification sounds and normal speech, with no particular musical requirements, monitor speakers are good enough.
And I have actually seen some sound systems that are worse than my current monitor speakers (although I can’t say why, considering they were other people’s setups). I even have the old SoundBlaster desktop speakers lying around somewhere and don’t consider them worth the effort.
Similarly, laptop speakers work well enough for non-music purposes too.
Honestly, most of the mid-range PC motherboards give a good enough sound output that one won’t require a separate cheap music system unless they want to disturb the neighbours.
I make do with my monitors’ speakers, which are pretty cheap. And when I care about sound quality, just use my headphones (which is the only audio thing I put a lot of money on) and having higher fidelity room speakers won’t even help me due to the traffic noise all day.
Monitor speakers are so awful, you can get a big improvement by spending $20 on a set of cheap PC speakers, which you can improve on more with a $100 soundbar.
Just due to the nature of how sound works, you need at least a certain amount of space for your divers and monitors are optimized to take up as little space as possible (over the screen itself). A lot of monitor speakers don’t even drive the sound towards you and sound like whatever is playing was recorded in a tin can.
Drive the speakers from your motherboard, you’re right that it can handle outputting signals that most people couldn’t even tell the difference between that and an expensive sound system (and those who say they can would surprise me if they could consistently do so in a blind test), but going from monitor speakers to dedicated speakers is one of the cheapest and most effective upgrades you can do with a PC IMO.
As I said, when I care about sound, I would just use my expensive headphones.
Just for hearing notification sounds and normal speech, with no particular musical requirements, monitor speakers are good enough.
And I have actually seen some sound systems that are worse than my current monitor speakers (although I can’t say why, considering they were other people’s setups). I even have the old SoundBlaster desktop speakers lying around somewhere and don’t consider them worth the effort.
Similarly, laptop speakers work well enough for non-music purposes too.