PC Audio
The first audio interfaces were plug and play ‘soundcards’ that you installed inside your PC, firstly in ISA format, then PCI, and most recently PCIe. Early models were primarily intended to accompany games playing, and didn’t really offer audio quality good enough for commercial recordings. I can still remember the first soundcards I reviewed that tipped the balance for me over to ‘professional’ audio quality; the 20-bit Echo Gina, Darla and Layla models, released in 1997 for Windows 95/98. As the available options mushroomed, I/O began to expand into rack-mounting cases, and nowadays the format choices can seem rather more complicated.
