I have been somewhat baffled by what "Realtek High Definition Audio" is, since it seems to mask the make and model of your sound card in Device Manager, or in the results of a system analyzer app like Belarc Advisor.
I have been under the impression that it's a driver that works with onboard sound cards, i.e. ones that are built into the motherboard, but I'd like more details.
If you have a mediocre sound card, does Realtek somehow override the native circuitry and make the output sound better? What about the input (recording) aspect? On my Acer One netbook, the input has a fair amount of analog noise but playback sounds surprisingly clean. Both are apparently controlled by the Realtek driver(s).
It's an onboard sound chip, not a physical card. Realtek is one of the, if not the preeminent purveyor of on-board sound chips for the PC market. Realtek makes the chips, and they write the drivers for the chips that allows them to function, then they sell the chips to motherboard manufactures. You see them frequently because they are dirt cheap and work well enough for most people. However a discrete sound card will usually sound a little better if you have the speakers for it. It used to be that a dedicated sound card was considered a must-have, since integrated audio really sucked up until about 7 years ago or so. Then Nvidia came out with their Soundstorm integrated audio in their Nforce motherboards, and showed everyone that integrated sound didn't have to suck. The gap between integrated and discrete audio solutions since then, in terms of sound quality, has gotten much smaller. But there are still audiophiles out there that prefer having a discrete sound card in their machines.
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