It’s easy to trash motherboard audio — we’ve been doing it for decades. While it’s true that on-board audio on motherboards used to be terrible, things have come a long way in the last 10 years. Motherboard manufacturers take signal isolation much more seriously than before, and use dedicated, high-quality audio chips that provide a clean audio experience that’s more than enough for most users. Motherboard audio is no match for an external DAC, but you shouldn’t jump to the latter before giving the former a fair chance.