I was always perfectly happy with my PC’s built-in audio. My setup was expensive enough to assure me that it used premium components with noise shielding and hi-res playback support, so a separate ...

If these were the early 2000s. We would have said that having a sound card is a flex. With good reason, too. You'd slap one into your PC, crank up a media player, and pretend you were mastering audio.