No sound when playing CDs

[Kuroyama]

I have a Soundblaster Live! 5.1 card and a LiteOn CD-RW. When I play games I can listen to the sound through headphones plugged into the CD-RW or through my computer speakers, but when I play a music CD in the CD-RW then I get no sound from the headphones but my speakers still play the sound.

Any ideas what the problem is or how I can fix it?

 

[Thor86]

Chances are your CD audio cable from CDRW to your soundcard/motherboard is not connected. You will have to open up your computer case to take a look.

 

[thirtythree]

Wouldn't it be the other way around if the CD audio cable was not connected? .. the headphones working but the speakers not working that is. Also, the microphone jacks on my CD/CD-RW drives do not allow me to listen to sound other than the CD that is currently in the drive and I know I have the CD audio cable hooked up. *confused*

 

[thaneboy]

Hello!
if go to Device Manager->cdrom properties
DIGITAL mode must be ON , so u may be experiencing the so. If u want to know why right click near the check box and open "What's this" .
If u disable it , u may hear from headphone ,perhaps u will need to reboot the pc.
If the problem is reversed , ensure u have connected the sound card and cdrom audio connector.

 

[Buz2b]

If I may, what thaneboy is trying to say is go to Device Manager and then click on the + sign next to the CDROM/DVD drives. Then right click on the particular drive. From there, (at least in XP) you would just make sure to click to place an X in the box that says "enable digital CD audio for this drive" ( or something damned close to that).

 

[Peter]

To get this sorted ...

(1) the CD-audio cable only works downstream from the drive to the sound card. So you _never_ get to listen to computer generated sound on headphones connected to the drive.

(2) There are two modes of CD audio replay:

Analog, where the _drive_ converts the CD data into audible sound, and sends the sound to its headphone connector and through the audio cable down to the sound card for the mixdown to the sound card's speaker outputs.
Digital, where the CD data are read into the computer's main RAM (through the IDE or SCSI cable), to let the CPU and/or sound card convert them into audible sound. In this mode, it's the computer, not the CD drive who performs the data->sound conversion, hence no sound on its headphone output.

regards, Peter