why no sound card with digital input from cdrom?

[mcveigh]

All new cdroms and dvd I see have a digital connector on the back, along with an analog one. But I have yet to see a sound card ith the digital input for it.

are there ones and I just missed it?

 

[Wolfsraider]

the sblive value i have, has it.

i used to use it but it has been a while since its been necessary

 

[Pariah]

All of Creative's higher end cards (Live, Audigy, Audigy 2) at least, have one. With current operating systems there is no need for any audio cable, as it is transmitted digitally over the IDE bus.

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: Pariah
All of Creative's higher end cards (Live, Audigy, Audigy 2) at least, have one. With current operating systems there is no need for any audio cable, as it is transmitted digitally over the IDE bus.

that was going to be my next question. so what is the point of having it?
I'm thinking of getting a high end card, I thought this would give better audio performance

 

[beatle]

I think all of my sound blaster cards have had it (awe64, live, live 5.1) as well as a TBSC. If you look on turtle beach's site, they have pictures of the card with arrows pointing to the features. Reading the arrows you'd think it didn't have a spdif input, but it does! Look to the top right of the card.

FWIW I don't notice much of a difference in SQ... using a set of cambridge soundworks HT speakers and a H/K receiver with the spdif output on my live 5.1.

 

[Pariah]

that was going to be my next question. so what is the point of having it?
I'm thinking of getting a high end card, I thought this would give better audio performance

If you are using something newer than Win98, there really isn't any point and it shouldn't carry any weight when determining what sound card you buy.

 

[Morph]

I don't understand. I thought the purpose of the audio cable was for when you wanted to play audio CDs in the drive. Are you saying that the cable is not required any more with Windows XP, even for this?

 

[Lonyo]

I have Win 2k and I never plugged the cables in, and my CD drives work fine. So, no, you don't need it really.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Originally posted by: Morph
I don't understand. I thought the purpose of the audio cable was for when you wanted to play audio CDs in the drive. Are you saying that the cable is not required any more with Windows XP, even for this?

In older versions of windows, your CD-ROM drive would outup the audio from the CD (either in analogue or digital format) through the connectors you mention, for the soundcard to send to the speakers.
In modern versions of windows, a process called Digital Audio Extraction is used whereby data is pulled from the CD through the IDE interface and then decoded by the CPU. This means that you won't need the extra cable under Win2k/XP