What's special about digital out (from cdrom)?

[santa590]

Many IDE cdrom has digital out compared to SCSI.
What's special about digital out?

 

[AMB]

Nothing much, instead of using the DAE and the IDE cable to get your sound, the cable goes directly to your sound card, there is no advantage,

 

[Ewu]

Actually I noticed when I play any cd's in my drive, it sound clearer by a little bit more than analog.

 

[AMB]

It should be clearer than analogue, but not the digital from the IDE cable

 

[pillage2001]

Actually, how would you know if you're using the Digital output instead of the IDE channel while playing your CD?

 

[Ewu]

There are button settings for both analog and digital in the Liveware Program for my Sound Blaster Live. You can have analog only, digital only, or both together on. After that, it doesn't take long to tell the difference.

 

[DaddyG]

I think that there is a difference. Digital Audio Extraction uses the CPU power to convert the data to audio. Direct digital uses the sound card signal processor.

 

[IamDavid]

The digital out cleans up the sound a great deal when I connect my computer to my home stereo.

 

[randomlinh]

hrmm.. since when do you play audio cd's thru the ide channel?

 

[Trilobyte1]

So if I were to hook up my cdrom drive to my sound card ( sound blaster live 5.1 xgamer ) via the digital output, the quality would be greater and there would be no kind of trade off?

 

[Trilobyte1]

double post, apologies

 

[macssuck]

while were on this topic can someone recomend a SCSI CD-Rom that has a working digital output

thanks