Hooking up CD-RW drive (1 Viewer)

[Julian Reville]

Hi,
I have just installed a Plextor IDE CD-RW drive as master, with my current DVD drive as slave. Everything boots up OK, but my Ensonic PCI soundcard only has one connector for the analog sound cable.
Do I need to worry about this, get a special Y cable, or get a new soundcard with more analog inputs?
I want to use the CD-RW to copy audio CDs and to make audio CDs from LPs.
Thanks for any help,
Julian

 

[Matt DeVillier]

Julian,
that analog cable is only for playing audio cd's, it doesn't affect anything else (reading, recording, etc). In fact, with some programs it's not even necessary as they transfer the data over the IDE bus and let the CPU do the D/A conversion (instead of the DAC in your cdrom/cdrw)
-Matt
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My DVD collection

 

[Julian Reville]

Thanks, Matt
I appreciate the info.

 

[Nick_Gray]

I would also like to point out that using that cable at all can degrade the sound from your CDs (if it is used). What happens is that the (usually very cheap) DAC in your CD drive is used to output an analog signal to your sound card. Your sound card will (probably) pipe that through its ADC so it can perform any equalization, DSP, bass management, etc. it is set up for. It then goes through the sound card's DAC and finally to your speakers.
Some recording applications will use the analog DAC-ADC-DAC route to record in realtime, so it possibly could affect your CD recording (again - it depends on the software and whether you are burning real-time or recording tracks to you hard disk first - the latter is always digital).
Assuming you are using Windows 9x/NT/2000 you can set up all your CD-ROM drives to use digital audio playback. If you don't know much about it, you will need a good walk-through. PM me if you are interested.

 

[Julian Reville]

Thanks Nick,
I'll try sending you a PM, if you don't get one, please let me know.
Julian