Contrary to hackENS, the hackerspace where I work right now does not have a woodworking space, which makes one itch for such projects. Being back home for one week for unrelated reasons, the obvious thing to do was a woodworking project! Besides, there's nothing like spreading chips everywhere and triggering smoke detectors with a friend.
In the aftermath of a convoluted history, sound cards are one of the most well-supported and common peripherals you can encounter on a PC. Today, the general user can expect to simply plug a 3.5mm (or 2.5mm, if they're fancy) jack in their system and have it work. This dramatically falls appart once you try to do (or build!) something non standard. On the net, information about sound cards is sparse and vastly outdated, dating back to the Sound Blaster era... In this post, I collect knowledge about current computer soundcards, their limitations and some tricks to mitigate them.