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Introduction to Pricing SoftwareStart Your Free Marketing Course
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Key Highlights
Pricing software is an automated system that enables business owners and developers to fix the prices of their goods appropriately while assessing the influential economic, geographic, and legal parameters.
The issue of pricing automation is especially acute for online stores that offer a fairly solid list of products in different geographical areas and must consider not only their own but also competitors’ pricing policy. Large amounts of information, their collection, and analysis take a lot of time for pricing specialists. Therefore, pricing software design helps reduce time and human resources in solving this problem.
Advantages of Pricing Software Free time:
The director can use the pricing software to carry out the pricing procedure ten times faster.
The team can direct the free time to develop the retail network, which will bring positive results in sales growth.
Reduced Errors:
Prices are calculated automatically according to specified formulas and algorithms.
It reduces errors, as the probability of making mistakes in the manual calculation is much higher.
Profit growth:
It provides increased turnover and the ability to control other areas of the retail network.
It reflects in revenue and profit growth.
Motivation:
Reducing routine tasks gives a person more time for more creative and diverse areas.
Thus, the director can review the profitability dynamics of individual assortment lines and retail stores in their free time.
Possible Programming errors:
Incorrectly written algorithms, not using proper formulas, attributing them to the wrong product lines to which they should belong, etc.
All of this can reflect incorrect pricing, inconsistent with the goals of the enterprise.
Unnecessary Automation:
It may not be desirable to automatically transfer goods to a group with a higher trade margin in case of frequent changes in the purchase price.
The system’s lack of adjustment of the retail price can lead to a shortfall in the target profit. In this regard, specialists must check retail prices and the total price change for the month.
Fluctuating Prices:
The software averages the prices when the receiving supplies are at different purchase prices.
As price regularly increases due to inflation and other factors, the company may spend the entire margin averaged by the system to purchase goods in the future.
Then the company does not receive the target profit from the goods.
Automation Failure:
In case of failure of the automation system, i.e., due to the failure of the hard drive or other elements, loss of entire or partial data is possible.
Re-entering data for the entire product range and all outlets manually may require as much time as was saved from the automation system.
Dependency on Automation:
If the business depends on an enterprise supplier of the automation system and the supplier closes, another company will have to service the system.
Final Thoughts Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Q1. What is pricing software?Answer: As E-commerce is becoming a prevalent method of buying and selling products, businesses must offer competitive pricing with varying trade margins for business growth. The pricing software gathers data from GA, CRM, and E-Commerce platforms and produces useful pricing options. The algorithms must consider the changes in costs, competitor pricing, taxes, and shipping and match the prices of similar products in the customer’s geographic locale.
Q3. What are the five pricing methods?Answer: The five pricing methods include cost-plus, penetration, competitive, value-based, and price skimming pricing. While the cost-plus performs the markup after totaling the costs, penetration pricing enters the market at a low price and gradually increases the prices. Competitive pricing chooses a competitive price, whereas value-based pricing sets fees as per customer review. Price skimming imposes both high and low costs to match the evolving market.
Q4. Can we solely depend on pricing software?Answer: No, we cannot solely depend on pricing software. It has to have a proper analyst who knows the essential economic and legal parameters while penetrating a new selling location.
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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Verbal Communication
Verbal Communication
Valuation, Hadoop, Excel, Mobile Apps, Web Development & many more.
Advantages of Verbal Communication Spoken Verbal Communication
Builds trust:- It helps to build trust, especially when paired with non-verbal cues like effective body language.
Effectively convey the message:- It helps to get the news effectively using intonation and, thus, is an integral part of customer service.
Decrease chances of miscommunication:- Spoken Communication helps avoid miscommunication since clarification is faster than its written counterpart.
Fastest mode of Communication:- Most businesses prefer calls and video meetings over written guidelines, as they are much quicker and more suitable for one-on-one doubt clearance.
Reach a wider audience:- It helps to reach a wider audience, similar to how this article is accessible worldwide.
Useful for illiterates:- Verbal Communication transcends the boundaries of the ability to read and write. For people, especially those who are illiterate and can speak and understand but not read or write, speech is the best mode of Communication to convey the message.
Written Verbal Communication
Transcends geographical boundaries:- Today, technology allows writers to share their views on something they can read from anywhere.
It helps readers become the narrator:- The first-person POV (Point of View) is a big thing in stories and novels that help the reader feel themselves in the shoes of the story’s narrator. Similarly, most books use the first-person to convey the feelings and thoughts of the characters.
Useful in negotiation and conflict resolution:- Verbal Communication is sure-sharp tool managers use to diffuse conflicts and employ negotiation power.
Chances of its misuse to spread hatred:- Speeches and public debates can also become tools for disturbing the peace for political agendas.
People may use it to control others:- Spoken words carry a lot of power and can make or break someone. People may use it to gaslight or manipulate others into going their way.
Less creative:- Spontaneous creativity is rare, and most stand-up performances require some level of non-verbal Communication to establish a connection with the audience.
Require attention throughout:- There is the possibility of missing out on important information if one is unattentive or is a non-native speaker of a particular language.
A negative effect of mood:- A person under anxiety or anger may not effectively convey the message to others. The pressure to speak in that state doesn’t give the mind enough space to think clearly and present their ideas.
Hard to be concise:- Verbal Communication requires being concise yet clear enough to convey the intended message. However, most of the time, conciseness may compromise quality.
High chance of misinterpretation:- Verbal Communication, especially using phrases, can get misinterpreted due to varying individual perceptions. One’s “I’m sorry” may be interpreted by the receiver as an apology for the wrongdoing. However, the speaker may have intended to apologize to diffuse the conflict but was not sorry for his actions.
Increases the chance of mistakes:- Compared to written, spoken verbal Communication is spontaneous and gives less time to the speaker to think. Besides, one has to be constantly attentive to grasp the details, which is not always possible, especially when tired or sleepy. It thus can result in more mistakes.
No option to revise:- It is especially true for oral-verbal Communication. A message, once sent, has no scope for revision or editing. However, after much thought, one can compose the same message in written form.
No legal validity and permanent record:- Besides having no legal validity, spoken Communication doesn’t hold any permanent record unless recorded.
Communication gap due to other accents:- Verbal Communication can be challenging with people from diverse backgrounds; a British or American accent may pose difficulties for an Indian student knowledgeable in written English.
It can be expensive:- Verbal Communication can save material costs, but it may become costly if a translator is required.
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Introduction to Linux KVM
Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others
How does Linux KVM Work?
Before diving into that, one must be aware of the fact that even if there are multiple virtual machines running images, each of the virtual machines needs to have its own set of virtual private hardware, like network card, disk, graphics adapter, CPUs and many such more.
Now coming back to the point of working of KVM, Linux is converted into a Type-1 hypervisor. Now to see the working of KVM, we would be encountering a lot of new words or terminologies.+987poi Here, we will take care to explain each of those terminologies. A hypervisor is like a monitoring tool which creates virtual machines and monitors them. Using hypervisor allows one computer to run multiple VMs by monitoring and tracking the resource sharing like memory, processing etc. Now, once the Linux is converted into a hypervisor, all the system-level components, viz. memory manager, input-output stack, process scheduler, network stack, device drivers etc., are already in place as it is a part of Linux Kernel.
Post that every VM is implemented through a regular Linux process where the Linux scheduler schedules the implementation making sure all virtual hardware like network cards, graphics adapter etc., are in place. The hypervisor can be thought about as a layer which exists between the virtualized system and the real hardware. The isolated operating system views the hardware platform underlying as one belonging to it as the hypervisor creates a form of an illusion. As years passed by, the KVMs evolved as well. Now the CPU extensions are used for virtualization by using a module with the host operating system’s kernel. Also, in recent times, KVM uses paravirtualization for some input-output drives, which improves the performance of the system for certain use cases.
How to Use Linux KVM?Before knowing how to install Linux KVM or running KVM in the system, it is mandatory to understand the virtualization capability of the processor or, in other words, understand if the processor can actually support hardware virtualization.
To check this, one must run the following command:
Or
If one doesn’t obtain any result post running these command, it is for sure that the hardware doesn’t support virtualization. In those cases, we must first prepare the processor by upgrading or taking minor changes in the processor so that virtualization is possible. If the system is not ready for virtualization, one will not be able to use KVM.
Another thing which needs to be kept in mind is that one needs to run a version of Linux released after 2007. Once these 2 boxes are checked, the host kernel module and processor-specific modules are loaded, and following that virtualization, daemon libvirtd is restarted hence completing the install and deployment of KVM.
Once there, we can easily use KVM for spinning up a virtual machine using GNOME or GNOME Classic.
Advantages:
As the KVM system derives itself from Linux, it is quite a matured system.
KVM comes in-built in most of Linux distributions.
KVM is open source and hence free to use.
KVM ensures performance and stability.
It has been developed by reputable organizations hence making it trustworthy to be used.
Libvirt makes administration automated.
KVM is available only for Linux distributions.
The host computer needs to be powerful enough to take the load of multiple VMs.
Using KVM has a learning curve attached to it.
Since the hardware is centralized, hence the risk of losing data in case of system failure increases exponentially.
Features of Linux KVMThere are a lot of features available for KVM, majorly having 8 different genres to take care of, which makes it the obvious choice for enterprises’ favorite hypervisor.
1. SecurityKVM uses a combination of security-enhanced Linux (SELinux) and secure virtualization (sVirt) for enhancing the VM security and isolation. Security boundaries are established around VMs and labels any manual labelling errors.
2. StorageKVM also supports any storage supported by Linux as it belongs to the part of Linux only! KVM uses multipath I/O for removing redundancy and thus improving storage capability.
3. Hardware SupportA variety of Linux supported hardware is available by KVM, and since hardware vendors are major contributors to kernel development, it is rapidly adaptive in Linux Kernel.
4. Memory ManagementThe memory management features of Linux are inherited by KVM, making it even more up to date in terms of updates. Non-uniform memory access and kernel same-page merging are some of the KVM features, which are the latest in the market.
5. Live Migration 6. Performance and ScalabilityWith the inheritance capability from Linux, KVM easily scales up to match the demand load with the request for guest machines or request increase.
7. Scheduling and Resource ControlThe Linux scheduler allows fine-grain control of the resource allocation to the KVM, making it super easy for one to control and schedule resources, enabling real-time extensions.
8. Lower Latency and Higher PrioritizationThe real-time extension capability of Linux makes the VM based apps run at lower latency and hence adhering to better prioritization. Even a process requiring long computing times is broken into small components and then scheduled, run, and processed accordingly.
ConclusionIn this article, we have touched upon the important aspects of KVM. Now we know for sure that whenever there is a problem with non-flexibility or being unscalable, KVM will to rescue the developers at that time. Another feather in the hat of KVM is the capability of keeping the guest account lean and allowing them to use only for specific utilities only.
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Advantages And Working Of C++ Endl With Examples
Introduction to C++ endl
Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others
Syntax:
The syntax of C++ endl is as follows:
cout<< statement to be executed <<endl; Working of C++ endl
Whenever the program is writing the output data to the stream, all the data will not be written to the terminal at once. Instead, it will be written to the buffer until enough data is collected in the buffer to output to the terminal.
But if are using flush in our program, the entire output data will be flushed to the terminal directly without storing anything in the buffer.
Whenever there is a need to insert the new line character to display the output in the next line while flushing the stream, we can make use of endl in C++.
Whenever there is a need to insert the new line character to display the output in the next line, we can make use of endl in ‘n’ character but it does not do the job of flushing the stream. So if we want to insert a new line character along with flushing the stream, we make use of endl in C++.
Whenever the program is writing the output data to the stream, all the data will not be written to the terminal at once. Instead, it will be written to the buffer until enough data is collected in the buffer to output to the terminal.
Examples of C++ endlFollowing are the examples of c++ endl:
Example #1C++ program to demonstrate endl in a program to print the given statements in a new line:
Code:
using namespace std; intmain( ) { cout<< "Welcome to "; cout<< "C#"<<endl; cout<< "Learning is fun"<<endl; }In the above program, the header file iostream is imported to enable us to use cout in the program. Then a namespace called std is defined. Then the main method is called. Then the cout is used to output the statement. Then again cout is used to output the statement along with endl to start the next statement in the new line and flush the output stream.
Example #2C++ program to demonstrate endl in a program to prompt the user to enter his or her name while using endl to print each statement in the next new line while flushing the output stream:
using namespace std; intmain( ) { string name; cout<< "Please enter your name: " <<endl; cout<< "My name is: "<< name <<endl; }Output:
In the above program, the header file iostream is imported to enable us to use cout in the program. Then a namespace called std is defined. Then the main method is called. Then a string variable is used to store the name entered by the user. Then cout is used to output the statement to prompt the user to enter his name withendl used in the statement so that the next statement is printed in the next new line. Then in takes, the name of the user entered by the user. Then cout is used to output the statement along with endl to start the next statement in the new line and flush the output stream.
Advantages
Whenever the program is writing the output data to the stream, all the data will not be written to the terminal at once. Instead, it will be written to the buffer until enough data is collected in the buffer to output to the terminal.
But if are using flush in our program, the entire output data will be flushed to the terminal directly without storing anything in the buffer.
By making use of endl, we can insert the new line character to display the output in the next line while flushing the stream.
There is no necessity to explicitly use flush if we are using endl in the program to flush the output stream.
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Top 7 Data Recovery Software In 2023
Data loss is a common issue that can happen to anyone at anytime. You may have experienced it yourself, whether it’s because you accidentally deleted a file or because your device got infected with malware. I remember a time when I was working on a project for a client, and my laptop suddenly crashed. I couldn’t access my files, and I was panicking because I didn’t have a backup. I spent hours trying to fix it, but nothing worked. That’s when I realized the importance of data recovery software.
Data recovery software is designed to retrieve your lost or deleted data, whether it’s because of a technical malfunction, accidental deletion, or a cyberattack. It works by scanning your device and locating the missing files and then restoring them to their original state.
If you’re in a similar situation where you’ve lost important data, don’t panic. There is a high chance that you can retrieve your data. However, it’s essential to choose a reliable and trustworthy program to avoid further damage to your storage device.
Which is also what this article is about. I’ve done the legwork to review the top tools that helped me get my data back. There are actually several tools I have used over the years because some tools specialize in certain areas, so I’ll make sure to highlight each tool’s strengths.
Is it guaranteed that you can recover your data?Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that data recovery software will be able to recover all of your lost data. The success of data recovery software depends on various factors, including the extent of the damage, the type of data loss, and the quality of the software being used.
In some cases, data recovery software may be able to retrieve all of your lost data. However, in other cases, it may only be able to recover a portion of it, or in some cases, it may not be able to recover any of it at all.
It’s important to note that if you have experienced data loss, you should stop using the affected device immediately to avoid overwriting or further damaging the lost data.
Recuva is a data recovery software developed by Piriform. It is designed to restore accidentally deleted files, such as documents, photos, videos, music, and emails, from various storage devices, including hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and digital cameras.
Pros:
Recuva is easy to use, and its interface is straightforward.
The software is fast and efficient, and it can recover files from various storage devices.
Recuva can recover files that were accidentally deleted, lost due to a virus attack, or damaged due to a system crash.
The software can also restore files that were emptied from the Recycle Bin, as well as files that were deleted from digital cameras and memory cards.
Recuva can preview files before recovering them, which helps identify the files that need to be recovered.
The software provides an option to securely delete files, which can be useful in protecting sensitive information.
Recuva can recover files from damaged or formatted disks, saving users from the hassle of having to format the disk.
Cons:
Recuva may be unable to recover all files, especially if they were overwritten or corrupted.
The free version of the software does not offer as many features as the paid version.
The software may not be able to recover files from extremely damaged disks.
Overall, Recuva is an excellent data recovery software that can help users recover accidentally deleted or lost files. It is easy to use, fast, and efficient, and it can recover files from various storage devices. While it may not be able to recover all files, especially if they were overwritten or corrupted, it is still a useful tool to have in case of a data loss emergency.
Here are some of the key features of CleverFiles data recovery software:
Compatibility: CleverFiles is compatible with both Windows and macOS operating systems, and it supports various file systems such as NTFS, FAT, HFS+, APFS, and others.
Preview feature: Before recovering your lost data, CleverFiles allows you to preview your files to ensure that you recover the right data.
Deep scan mode: The software offers a deep scan mode that can recover data that has been lost due to formatting, partition loss, virus attack, system crash, and other scenarios.
User-friendly interface: CleverFiles has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users to navigate and recover their lost data. It also provides clear instructions and prompts to guide users through the recovery process.
Flexible recovery options: CleverFiles offers flexible recovery options that allow users to recover their data in a way that suits their needs. Users can choose to recover all their lost data or select specific files and folders.
Support: CleverFiles offers excellent customer support through various channels such as email, live chat, and phone. They also have a knowledge base and video tutorials to assist users with common issues.
TestDisk is a free and open-source data recovery software that is used to recover lost data from damaged or corrupted storage devices. It can be a lifesaver for people who have accidentally deleted their important files or have lost them due to disk failure or other similar issues.
The software is compatible with various platforms, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Key Features:
TestDisk is a command-line tool that can be used to recover lost partitions, fix partition table, and repair file systems on a wide range of storage devices including hard disks, USB drives, memory cards, and CDs/DVDs.
The software is capable of recovering various file types such as photos, videos, documents, and archives. It can even recover lost files from damaged or formatted partitions.
TestDisk is also equipped with a feature called PhotoRec, which is a companion tool that can recover lost files from various file systems including NTFS, FAT, exFAT, and HFS+.
The software supports various file systems including FAT, NTFS, ext2/ext3/ext4, and ReiserFS.
TestDisk is easy to use, even for non-technical users. The software provides a step-by-step wizard that guides users through the recovery process.
The software is lightweight and doesn’t require installation. Users can run it from a USB drive or CD/DVD.
TestDisk is free and open-source, which means anyone can use it without any restrictions or hidden costs.
Overall, TestDisk is an excellent data recovery software that is powerful, versatile, and easy to use. It is a great choice for people who have lost their data due to various reasons and want to recover it quickly and efficiently.
Recoverit is a data recovery software that helps individuals and businesses recover lost or deleted files from a variety of storage devices, including hard drives, USB drives, SD cards, and more. Losing important data can be a stressful and frustrating experience, but Recoverit aims to alleviate some of that anxiety by providing a simple and effective solution for data recovery.
Supports multiple file types: Recoverit can recover a wide range of file types, including photos, videos, documents, and emails, among others.
Works with multiple storage devices: The software can recover data from various storage devices, such as hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and cameras, among others.
Easy to use: Recoverit has a user-friendly interface that makes navigating easy, even for those with little technical experience.
Preview before recovery: Recoverit allows users to preview the files before recovery to ensure they recover the right files.
Safe and secure: The software is designed to ensure that the recovered data is safe and secure and will not be damaged during recovery.
One of the best things about Recoverit is that it’s compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems. Additionally, the preview function is a fantastic feature that lets you preview your files before you initiate the recovery process. This way, you can ensure that you’re recovering the correct files and not wasting your time on unnecessary data.
EaseUS Data Recovery helps recover deleted, lost, or formatted data from various devices like computers, laptops, hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and other storage devices. Losing important data can be a frustrating experience, and EaseUS Data Recovery software is designed to help recover the data in a simple and effective way.
Here are some key features of EaseUS Data Recovery software:
Easy to use: The software has a user-friendly interface that allows users to navigate and recover their lost data easily.
Quick and deep scans: The software can quickly scan the device to find lost data; if it cannot find it, it can perform a deeper scan to search for the data.
Preview function: Users can preview the recoverable files before recovering them, which saves time and ensures that the correct files are recovered.
Multiple file formats: The software supports various formats, including documents, photos, videos, audio, emails, and archives.
Multiple languages: The software is available in multiple languages, which makes it accessible to users around the world.
Multiple platforms: The software is compatible with Windows and Mac operating systems.
Multiple storage devices: The software can recover data from various storage devices, including hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and other storage devices.
The software is easy to use and has a wide range of features that make it effective for recovering data from a variety of storage devices. The deep scan feature is particularly impressive, as it can recover data from even severely damaged disks.
In terms of cons, the app can be a bit slow when scanning large drives, which can be frustrating. Additionally, the free version of the software only allows for a limited amount of data recovery, which can be a downside if you have large amounts of lost data.
MiniTool Data Recovery Software is a powerful data recovery tool that helps users to recover lost or deleted files from a wide range of storage devices such as hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and other storage media. This software is easy to use and provides an intuitive interface that even non-technical users can operate without any difficulty.
The tool is designed to help users recover their data in various situations, including accidental deletion, virus attacks, system crashes, and hardware failure.
Supports various file formats: This software supports various file formats, including documents, photos, videos, audio files, and archives.
Multiple Scan Modes: The software comes with multiple scan modes, including Quick Scan, Deep Scan, and Full Scan, allowing users to choose the appropriate scan method based on the data loss scenario.
Preview Functionality: The preview function allows users to view the recoverable files before starting the recovery process, enabling them to choose the necessary files to recover.
Filter and Search Option: The software also includes a filter and search option, which allows users to filter the results based on file type, size, date modified, etc., making it easier to locate the files they want to recover.
Supports Various Storage Devices: MiniTool Data Recovery Software supports a wide range of storage devices, including hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and other storage media.
Safe and Secure: The software is safe and secure to use, as it does not overwrite or damage the original data during the recovery process.
One of the things that makes MiniTool data recovery software stand out is its ability to recover a wide range of file types, including photos, videos, documents, and more. It can also recover data from a variety of file systems, such as NTFS, FAT, and exFAT.
Another great thing about MiniTool data recovery software is that it offers a free version that allows users to recover up to 1GB of data. This can be really helpful for people who only need to recover a few files and don’t want to pay for a full-featured data recovery software.
R-Studio is a data recovery software that helps to retrieve lost or damaged data from various types of storage devices, such as hard disks, USB drives, CD/DVD, and other types of memory cards. Losing data can be a distressing experience, but R-Studio offers a reliable solution to help recover lost data, which can provide some comfort to users who have lost important files.
Key features of R-Studio include:
Support for various file systems: R-Studio can recover data from various file systems, including FAT (FAT12, FAT16, FAT32), exFAT, NTFS, ReFS, HFS/HFS+ (Mac), UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris), Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 FS (Linux), and more.
Deep scanning: R-Studio performs a deep scan of the storage device to locate lost or damaged files, which increases the chances of data recovery.
Preview feature: The software allows users to preview recovered files before restoring them, which helps to ensure that the right files are restored.
RAID recovery: R-Studio can recover data from damaged or corrupted RAID configurations, including RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6.
Emergency startup media: R-Studio allows users to create an emergency startup media (such as a USB drive or CD/DVD) to recover data from a computer that cannot boot.
Flexible search parameters: Users can specify search parameters such as file name, extension, and size to make the recovery process more efficient.
One of the cool things about R-Studio is that it can work with different file systems, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using Windows, Mac, or Linux. It can also recover files from different types of storage devices, including RAID arrays.
Overall, R-Studio is a reliable and effective tool for data recovery, and it’s definitely worth considering if you’ve lost important files and need to get them back.
How does data recovery software work?Data recovery software works by scanning your storage device and locating lost or deleted data. It analyzes the file system of the storage device to search for fragments of data that can be recovered.
When you delete a file or experience data loss, the file is not immediately removed from your storage device. Instead, the space it occupies on the device is marked as available for new data. Until new data is saved in that space, the deleted file can often be recovered using data recovery software.
Buying A Sound Card: Benefits, Pricing And More
Do You Need a Sound Card?People with a passing knowledge of computer hardware might know that most people don’t need a sound card at all. But how do you define “most people?” Whenever you’re hearing people say sound cards are unnecessary, they’re usually referring to the fact that onboard sound (that is, sound from your motherboard) has evolved enough over the years to make traditional sound cards obsolete.
And in many cases, especially on newer computers, this is true. However, onboard sound can still suffer from electrical interference (thanks to your sound processing being done in proximity to the rest of your computer), and with older machines onboard sound sometimes can be outright painful to listen to.
So if you’re on an older machine with poor onboard sound/no onboard sound support, you should probably buy yourself a sound card. Other parties might want to purchase sound cards, too, such as professional gamers and high-end audio enthusiasts. More on that in a bit.
Benefits of a Sound CardAside from the obvious boosts to quality, there are a few key benefits to buying a sound card.
Support for more audio channels – 5.1 and 7.1 channel audio offers more ports for better surround sound speaker systems and directional audio in headphones.
Adding more/better audio ports to a system that otherwise doesn’t have them.
On older systems/CPUs, sound cards can take some load off of the CPU by handling the sound processing instead. In modern hardware, though, this difference isn’t really noticeable.
Shielding against an electric interference. High-end sound cards will have an actual shield to prevent electrical interference from other components entirely, but even unshielded sound cards make a world of difference when plugged into the lowest PCI slot on a motherboard away from everything else.
More accurate bass, sounds and directional audio. If you’re dealing with a low-end onboard sound chip, the leap to a sound card will be immense based solely on how much clearer you’ll be hearing the audio. However, note that these benefits can only be enjoyed on hardware that’s good enough. You’re not going to get better sound out of a pair of earbuds you grabbed at the register for $3, for instance.
Comparing Sound CardsWhen comparing sound cards to one another, there are four primary specifications to compare. These specs are as follows.
Audio channels Bit depthBit depth ranges from 8 to 16 to 24. You’ll see this spec toted around a lot, but most don’t know what it actually means. Basically, bit depth manages the range of what you can hear, with 24-bit depth in audio being nigh perfectly accurate. High bit-depth benefits even low-quality audio by lowering the noise floor and ceiling. Basically, the lower your bit depth, the harder it will be to distinguish quiet from loud. 16 is the bare minimum, and 24 is high end.
SNRSound-to-noise ratio. Have you ever plugged in your speakers and turned them up really high while nothing was playing? That buzzing you heard is the “noise” in SNR. The higher your SNR, the quieter that background noise.
Sample RateSample rate is measured in KHz and ranges from 44.1 to as high as 192. Some audiophiles swear that the astronomically high numbers are better, but unless you have world-class hearing and equipment, you’re unlikely to hear the difference in most cases. 44/48 KHz is absolutely fine, but if you’re investing in high-end audio hardware you can go higher. It can lead to dimishining returns, though.
How Much You Should Be Paying For OneFinally, there’s the discussion of what you should be paying for a sound card. I’ll separate your payments into tiers based on what you want/need, as well as some additional notes.
$20-40 USD: if your onboard audio is bugged or nonexistent and you just need some proper sound.
$50-$80 USD: if your onboard audio is fine but doesn’t support your gaming headphones or sound system.
$90-$150 USD: if you want the highest possible clarity and quality in your audio but are fine with your audio as it is, there’s no need to make a big leap.
$150-$200 USD: if you’re an audio professional, but note that you’ll also need to invest in high-end headphones.
If you make sure you’re buying a modern sound card from a reputable brand and follow this guide you should be fine. If you’re interested in reading up on buying some decent headphones, read Nicholas’s article on the topic.
Image Credit: WikiMedia Commons
Christopher Harper
I’m a longtime gamer, computer nerd, and general tech enthusiast.
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