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cdrom audio cable

T

techmaster98

Junior Member
this may sound like a funny question: but what is the point of the cd-rom audio cable these days in cd rom drives?

If you use Windows Media Player or any other audio player, wont it play the cd by getting data via the IDE cable? So wouldnt the audio cable be useless then?

EDIT: sorry, wrong forum, this should be in general hardware, I clicked the wrong one by mistake.
 
that is how the magic smoke gets from the Cd to the smoke storage chamber on the motherboard
 
Yeah, that cable was used for analog input to the motherboard (i.e. the CD drive did the decoding). Modern computers can just read the data off the CD directly and decode it.
 
Uh, because you don't need to slow down your computer by playing an audio CD digitally to your crappy speakers? Might as well use analog. (this obviously applies more to older computers.)
 
CD drives are also CD players (hence the headphone plug in most (all?) of them). PCs are plenty fast now, though, to decode CDs without breaking a sweat. I can't remember that last time I cared about those little cables.
 
i still have them on my 146 rig. i never thought about it, but yeah, how useless. guess it's still easier to have them in the case than storing them somewhere.
 
it was back when the Soundcard was on the ISA slot i believe. Nowadays, the IDE ribbon and the motherboard can support the sound bites easily through the PCI bus.
 
Okay...I learned somethng today. I mean, I never really paid attention...I've just installed the cable with ecery upgrade...never even thinking about whether it was needed.

So the question now is...why do they still have the connector on the mobo if it isn't needed?
 
Originally posted by: altonb1
Okay...I learned somethng today. I mean, I never really paid attention...I've just installed the cable with ecery upgrade...never even thinking about whether it was needed.

So the question now is...why do they still have the connector on the mobo if it isn't needed?
Click to expand...

specification probably requires it
not all software supports digital playback.
 
Originally posted by: Heisenberg
Yeah, that cable was used for analog input to the motherboard (i.e. the CD drive did the decoding). Modern computers can just read the data off the CD directly and decode it.
Click to expand...

finally.
 
If you dig around on diyaudio, there are people selling controller kits using a normal CD-ROM's audio output...some pretty cool stuff, I might make me a cheap transport to play with in the future.
 
analog audio out. it plugs into an input on older sound cards. later on, programs switched to digital streams, with the D/A conversion happening in the sound card rather than the CD-ROM drive.
 
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