what are those cd/aux in ports for again?

[Quartz]

Greeting from a psuedo hardware newbie.

I'm building a quick and dirty home PC for a project, but I need a
refresher course on how to hook up the cd drive.

I've built several PCs before, but they were all intended mainly for
number crunching or as fileservers, and so I never had to do much with
audio or video... I'm looking at the mobo and I'm seeing those cd
connector ports, and I forget what they're there for (other than having
something to do with the sound system).

Can someone briefly explain what those do and what I should be hooking
up to what? are they still needed these days or are they some sort of
legacy thing?


For reference, I'm building off of an Intel d815eea type board.

http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/d815eea/sb/cs-01306
0.htm

It only has 3 ports on it ("CD-ROM","CD-IN", and "AUX-IN" - B C and D
respectively in the 2nd table down) rather than the 4 listed.

thanks in advance

 

[Conor]

Greeting from a psuedo hardware newbie.

I'm building a quick and dirty home PC for a project, but I need a
refresher course on how to hook up the cd drive.

I've built several PCs before, but they were all intended mainly for
number crunching or as fileservers, and so I never had to do much with
audio or video... I'm looking at the mobo and I'm seeing those cd
connector ports, and I forget what they're there for (other than having
something to do with the sound system).

Can someone briefly explain what those do and what I should be hooking
up to what? are they still needed these days or are they some sort of
legacy thing?

They're not needed anymore. In ye olden days, when DOS was still a
major OS, CD audio was sent from the drive over a cable to the
connector on a soundcard. Nowadays, it is sent in digital form over the
IDE cable so no need anymore for a CD audio cable.

 

[Conor]

Conor, <[email protected]>, whose name means "spindly drag-queen;
dreams about sexual encounters with relatives; was butt ****ed hard by
donkey when young - hasn't been the same since", jawed:

They're not needed anymore.

Why wouldn't they be not needed anymore?

In ye olden days, when DOS was still a major OS, CD audio was sent from
the drive over a cable to the connector on a soundcard.

Why do you feed the troll?

Nowadays, it is sent in digital form over the IDE cable so no need
anymore for a CD audio cable.

Try logging in as field, password support.

 

[Quartz]

They're not needed anymore. In ye olden days, when DOS was still a
major OS, CD audio was sent from the drive over a cable to the
connector on a soundcard. Nowadays, it is sent in digital form over the
IDE cable so no need anymore for a CD audio cable.

Ok, so the cable was superseded by newer OSs or newer mobos? whenabouts
did this change happen roughly?

 

[Mike Hollywood]

1998

Ok, so the cable was superseded by newer OSs or newer mobos? whenabouts
did this change happen roughly?

 

[Ralph Wade Phillips]

Howdy!

Ok, so the cable was superseded by newer OSs or newer mobos? whenabouts
did this change happen roughly?

Win98SE allows you to turn on and off digital extraction. I have a
98Gold box I can check on tomorrow and see if that supports it also.

Me? I have better things to do with my I/O bandwidth than run audio
up and down it - I put the cable in and let the analog mixer handle it,
using the DAC on the CD or DVD drive. But that's me.

RwP

 

[Quartz]

Win98SE allows you to turn on and off digital extraction. I have a
98Gold box I can check on tomorrow and see if that supports it also.

Ok, that's far older than any system I'd be using, so no problems there.
I'm assuming that you don't need any kind of special support on the
hardware side for this? (such as DAO or something)

Me? I have better things to do with my I/O bandwidth than run audio
up and down it - I put the cable in and let the analog mixer handle it,
using the DAC on the CD or DVD drive. But that's me.

Hmm, this assumes that the DAC doesn't suck though. I'd figure the one
on the soundcard would be a lot better.

 

[Ralph Wade Phillips]

Howdy!

Ok, that's far older than any system I'd be using, so no problems there.
I'm assuming that you don't need any kind of special support on the
hardware side for this? (such as DAO or something)

Nope, thankfully.

Well, it does have to support digital data extraction. If the speed
is a two digit, it supports it B)

Hmm, this assumes that the DAC doesn't suck though. I'd figure the one
on the soundcard would be a lot better.

And that you could hear the difference. And that the speakers could
reproduce the difference.

Me? I'm 49. I have tinnitus. I can't hear any difference B)

RwP

 

[Quartz]

Well, it does have to support digital data extraction. If the speed
is a two digit, it supports it B)

Yeah, 30-something-x cdr/dvd.

And that you could hear the difference. And that the speakers could
reproduce the difference.

Me? I'm 49. I have tinnitus. I can't hear any difference B)

I'm an audiophile who can hear frequencies above 24khz, and I'm not
using generic computer speakers for this setup


Well, I think I've gotten an answer to my original question...
basically, that cable is only necessary for playing audio CDs under
really old OSs, and that the only thing I'd get from hooking it up
nowadays would be to save on bandwidth across the IDE chain.....?

That works. The reason I ask all this is that I don't seem to have any
of those cables lying around in my bin of computer parts, and I was
afraid I'd have to be ripped off at radioshack to get one.


So, thanks y'all.

 

[Praxiteles Democritus]

I'm an audiophile who can hear frequencies above 24khz, and I'm not
using generic computer speakers for this setup

You've used a tone generator to test that? I used a tone generator and
couldn't hear above 17khz.

Well, I think I've gotten an answer to my original question...
basically, that cable is only necessary for playing audio CDs under
really old OSs, and that the only thing I'd get from hooking it up
nowadays would be to save on bandwidth across the IDE chain.....?

That works. The reason I ask all this is that I don't seem to have any
of those cables lying around in my bin of computer parts, and I was
afraid I'd have to be ripped off at radioshack to get one.


So, thanks y'all.

You might want to hook up the cables still if you want to play your
cd's at 1x speed and in analog mode. Using the digital playback
through the PCI bus the cdrom plays at a higher speed and can be
noisy.

 

[Quartz]

You've used a tone generator to test that?

Yep. Several times. It runs in the family- my sister always used to
wonder why silent dog whistles weren't silent.

It's very much a mixed blessing though, as I can hear high pitch
screeches generated by some circuit boards and stuff. My friend has a TV
at his place and I can't be anywhere within two rooms of the thing when
he turns it on or else I'll end up crying due to the pain (they all
think I'm nuts).

I used a tone generator and
couldn't hear above 17khz.

I surprised/confused my middleschool nurse once- they were doing hearing
tests in the gym (during basketball practice for whatever reason, the
teachers weren't especially smart I noticed) and I could hear stuff up
to the top of what the machine could produce over all the background
noise... she kept flipping switches and saying "How about now?" and
frowning

Also- Make sure you get a *good* tone generator. I've noticed that a lot
of the cheaper ones can't actually produce clear tones in the upper
ranges like they say they can, and actually produce octave-shifted
garbage instead. This is especially true of computer programs that
create test-tone wav files at specified frequencies, and any CD player
that has skip protection.

Don't feel put out or alone though, the human range is *supposed* to be
up to 20k, a lot of people can't hear past the mid teens. Wasn't it the
Xing encoder that used to cut corners by chopping off everything above
16k or something?

You might want to hook up the cables still if you want to play your
cd's at 1x speed and in analog mode. Using the digital playback
through the PCI bus the cdrom plays at a higher speed and can be
noisy.

Hmm... that's a good point.

To be honest though, I don't really care all that much. If I want to
play a CD I'll usually put it in my stereo... I was only asking about
the wire because I remembered that something about the CD player
wouldn't work if I didn't have one.

And if I can save on one more wire flopping around in the case, so much
so the better. I need to look into getting one of those Xconnect PSUs....