You know that wire you had to connect to your sound card from your cd rom drive? Whats up with that?

[Intelman07]

Is that wire required or not? Whats it do? I noticed that on the back of my DVD-Rom drive there are connections for digital and analog audio. What is it for i know it is for audio but i want a explanation. Thanks!

 

[arcenite]

That connection allows you to play music cds and such in your rom drives

Bill

 

[theNEOone]

Originally posted by: aRCeNiTe
That connection allows you to play music cds and such in your rom drives

Bill

That used to be case, but I don't have those cables connected in my computer, and I can play CDs just fine. (Regular CDs, in wav format.)

 

[arcenite]

Oh, well I havn't tested the cd-rom drive w/ out the audio cable, that's good to know then Then my answer to you intelman (pretty much the same as NEOone's) It used to be required to play Audio CD's, but now I guess w/ the newer technology, you don't need it.

Bill

 

[Loco3KGT]

It's supposed to be for dumping raw audio from the CD/DVD straight to the sound card so it doesn't have to go over any data bus. Because raw CD audio is a lot of data.

 

[Quaggoth]

Digital Audio Extraction is a fairly new thing that allows your music to be carried over the IDE cable, through the ?Southbridge? and to the PCI bus to your soundcard...

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Your CD-ROM drive has an internal Digital-to-Analogue convertor (DAC) which can output an analogue stream to your soundcard which is then simply amplified and sent to the speakers. That uses the little 4-pin wire that almost all CD-ROMs have.

If can also output a digital stream using the two-pin cable that is available on many CD-ROMs, which is then processed by the DACs on your soundcard.

Then there is DAE as someone else mentioned, which sends the data as a bitstream down the IDE channel and is decoded by the soundcard.

I believe that DAE offers the best sound quality. It also doesnt require a cable from CD-ROM to soundcard.

 

[Brian48]

Yep. Since Win2k, you don't need the cable any more. WinXP works the same way. You just need to have digital extraction checked off in device manager for the drive. I believe you still need it for WinME/Win9x.

 

[CubicZirconia]

I believe you still need it for WinME/Win9x.

Thats correct. The cable is not necessary in 2k/xp (like he said).

 

[AndyHui]

I'm sure I wrote something about this....

Ah yes....Here it is (FAQ).

 

[Macro2]

Whenever I see Andy Hui's name I go right to FAQ's. <G>

 

[kgraeme]

Originally posted by: AndyHui
I'm sure I wrote something about this....

Ah yes....Here it is (FAQ).

LOL! Andy's all FAQ'd up.