What's the purpose of the CD audio cable?

[Maggotry]

I've never noticed any difference to a system whether you use the 4-pin audio cable or not. What's it for? Is there anything to be gained or lost by using it?

 

[So]

If I am correct (which I very easily could not be) the CD Audio cable is a legacy Item from the days when CD-Rom drives couldn't digitally decode CDs.

 

[microAmp]

<< I've never noticed any difference to a system whether you use the 4-pin audio cable or not. What's it for? Is there anything to be gained or lost by using it? >>



I always thought it was for when you put in a music CD in the CD ROM to hear the music.....

 

[Jerboy]

It's for analog playback.

I don't know what OS you are using, but on Win 98 and Me, look for your CD-ROM drives in device manager.

In "properties" tab you should see "Enable Digital CD audio for this CD-ROM deivce". Whether you can use this or not depends on your CD-ROM drive's DAE capability and sound board driver.


When you enable this, your CD-ROM basically operates in Digital audio extraction mode and carries digital audio signal over the signal line, goes through IDE port and plays back through sound board. Your CD-ROM drive will be spinning at full speed the whole time(unless you have Lite-On's with SmartX technology).

When it's disabled, CD-ROM drive runs at 1x and plays analog signal through it's CD audio cable and directly into sound board.

I personally prefer to use analog output since it doesn't keep my CD-ROM drive spinning at maddening 8,000RPM the whole time I'm playing music and it doesn't use IDE bandwidth.

 

[agentK]

What's the purpose of the CD audio cable?

one of them is so you can play an audio cd directly by pressing the play button in front of the drive instead of opening a program.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Well explained jerboy...
It's simply a legacy from the days when CD drives were bad at D/A conversion. CD-Rom drives have an onboard D/A converter, and the 4-pin cable takes a decoded analogue signal straight to the sound card.

 

[Maggotry]

I've never used a CD audio cable and music cd's play just fine with media player. That's true with 98SE, ME and XP. I haven't noticed them spinning at max speed either, but I've never paid any attention to it. System specs are in sig.

So,

If you use the cable: you get analog music, don't tie up the IDE channel, and don't spin your drive at max rpm's
If you don't use the cable: you get digital music, is much more resource intensive (IDE and PCI), drive spins like mad

That sound about right? It may be better to use the cable and get analog sound to save resources. I'm sure I have one laying around somewhere.............

 

[DN]

You also have to consider that some drives also have a digital out, not just an analog out..

 

[Woodchuck2000]

<< You also have to consider that some drives also have a digital out, not just an analog out.. >>


I was waiting for someone to confuse the issue further

The Onboard DAC on cd-rom drives is pretty crappy, So i use the digital cable and let my SB-Live's DAC do all the hard work.

I'll wait for someone who knows what they're talking about to answer the CPU and IDE util issues cos I havnt got a clue.

 

[DN]

<<

<< You also have to consider that some drives also have a digital out, not just an analog out.. >>


I was waiting for someone to confuse the issue further

The Onboard DAC on cd-rom drives is pretty crappy, So i use the digital cable and let my SB-Live's DAC do all the hard work.

I'll wait for someone who knows what they're talking about to answer the CPU and IDE util issues cos I havnt got a clue. >>



So, this would mean that you have "Enable Digital CD audio for this CD-ROM deivce" disabled, correct..?

 

[Mavrick007]

If you use either of your cd digital or cd analog cables out of the cdrom and have it set to "Enable Digital cd Audio.." then it would be redundant. Either use the cable or have the setting in your OS.

Some sound cards don't have many connectors now for the cd audio so it's best to use sparingly in case you need it (ie. like my hardware decoder needs a connection since it has digital coax on the card).

 

[ssanches]

I prefer using the analog signal than the digital one. It saves my PCI bandwidth. I can hardly hear any difference between the analog and digital sources on my FPS-1500 speakers