Do I need a sound card?

[SuperCell]

One thing I noticed after building my fist PC, is that the apparent "quality" of the sound from the integrated motherbaord audio is very low. Music sounds "cheap", no matter what is done with the equalizer.

I mean, the sound quality from a stock, low-end laptop sounds better than this.

Is this typical?

 

[dandragonrage]

The only problems onboard audio may give you are:
-Hiss/hum (poor SNR, hum may be a bad ground)
-A highpass filter probably around 20Hz (which doesn't matter for most of us, and it won't be heard with any computer speakers)

Make sure your drivers are recent. You can try kernel streaming or ASIO from a media player and see if it helps. If not, then I think you're imagining things or the source is bad.

 

[kagebarton]

It really depends on the quality of your onboard sound chipset, some of the stuff on recent highend motherboards have very good onboard sound (most people with mid range speakers won't be able to tell the difference)