[joe91]

This is nonsense. The main reason behind the demise of dedicated sound cards: motherboard sound chipsets got "good enough". The value add wasn't adding enough value any more because you can get decent sound quality just by using the default sound output provided by your motherboard.

3D sound and other processing got baked into middleware for games because it became trivial to do all of the processing in software - and the processing became more advanced than anything that the sound card vendors were offering (and they didn't move quickly enough anyway).

Pro audio vastly progressed past anything that is possible to provide in fixed silicon. For input, dedicated USB (and ethernet) audio interfaces progressed to the point where it would be ridiculous to provide such functionality on a general "sound card".

It's just evolution - there just isn't a compelling enough niche for a dedicated sound card any more.

[ideashower]

This is the answer. The only people buying dedicated sound cards these days are those doing audio engineering or production work, needing access to dedicated inputs and interfaces. Motherboard sound chipsets cover nearly every other use case.

[retrac]

Correct. Same thing has happened with GPUs. The vast majority of general purpose computers sold today come with integrated graphics. Only those who have unusually heavy 3D graphics needs, like CAD or the latest games at full quality, still buy a discrete video card.

[utucuro]

To add to this - I have a dedicated sound card on my desktop - it lives inside the USB tiny dongle of my gaming headset and makes it emulate surround sound a little bit better. My two tinny tiny speakers are connected to the onboard audio output. Anything I watch, I watch on the TV, or via a bluetooth headset on the phone or tablet. Anything I listen to, I listen to on the phone via aforementioned bluetooth headset, or the nice big non-mobile bluetooth speaker.

I USED to have two powerful and rather higher quality speakers attached to a creative card back in the day when I did all that with the PC though.