If you have a high impedance set of headphones, which are most commonly quite expensive and intended for studio use, then you'll need a USB sound card that can actually drive them. For example ...
New from AudioScience is the ASI5752 Dante PCIe Sound Card. The company describes it as “a high-density, 64×64 channel ...
Before the AdLib sound card, sound on PCs was in a terrible shape. Since the dawn of IBM, all PCs included a speaker, but this PC speaker was only capable of sounding one note at a time.