[exged]

Totally agree that most PCs have terrible analog sound quality, often plagued with EMI noise and other distortions. I still find BT to be a pain on Linux and Windows (unlike Mac / iOS, where Apple has really figured out the experience). I ended up buying a bunch of Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapters for $9 each. Fantastic audio quality and tiny enough to leave permanently attached to headphones. The only catch is they aren't great with very high impedance headphones unless you add an external amplifier.

[trabant00]

> Totally agree that most PCs have terrible analog sound quality, often plagued with EMI noise and other distortions.

This hasn't been the case for many many years. Most decent motherbords come with on board sound on par with 200 usd external DACs. Thinkpad laptops as well. Did blind tests with coworkers who owned DACs - they could not tell.

[vladvasiliu]

I think this is highly dependent on how high-end the computer is or at least who their target user is.

My (old) MBP sounds great to me. My (much newer!) HP ProBook has hissing and various random noises when I move the mouse, and I can hear this even with cheap headphones tailored for conferencing. Don't know how "accurate" either one is, but no hissing wins for me every time.

I think you nail it with most decent motherboards. There are a lot of computers on the market, especially laptops, that are just cheap and try to get away with whatever low quality components and engineering they can. In particular, I'm thinking about HP "enterprise" models which are just awful. Their target audience doesn't really care about audio quality, so why would they? Most people don't have a choice when it comes to their work computers, so they may end up stuck with something mediocre. Then again, most people don't care, so there's probably not much hope to see any improvement on this front...