What does the audio cable to a cd/dvd player do?

[cjolley]

If anything?
I have put that cable on countless computers despite always having to scrounge around for one with the right ends.
But this last DVD writer I got to replace a broken one didn't even have a place to plug one in. I got great reviews on New Egg so I just shrugged my shoulders and put it in without the cable.
Every thing works just fine.
Did the need for that cable end with DOS 6.22?

[Jammrock]

You mean the little four wire audio cable? The one you used to plug the CD/DVD into the video card with?

Those haven't been used in ages. The players use straight digital to the sound card now. Have since... Win98? XP I know for sure. It's been so long I don't even remember

Your old drive must have been pretty ancient

[cjolley]

Your old drive must have been pretty ancient

LOL, that was the middle age drive here. Mine is a bit newer, though it has the cable. That one was ChooChoo's. Becky's is even older.
Come to think of it, this is our first SATA cd/dvd drive.
Stuff doesn't seem to break much anymore. Takes all the fun out of it.

[VJ]

I think some playback software still allows you to select if you want the audio passed through that cable, or the more general way, but these options are quite rare...

IIRC, without the cable, the drive' drivers is involved in passing the audio; with the cable, you can bypass the driver and feed the digital audio signal straight to a soundcard or so.

[Nicram]

VJ is right, it is cable that use audio-out (4 pins). Many years ago i had Dysan CD-242E and MS-DOS operating system, where i could listen to music from Audio CD only when i connect this cable on the soundcard directly (it was Gallant SC66 i think, ot something). Today it can go directly by ATA/SATA cable. Also some of CD/DVD drives had 2 pins for that too, that send signal in digital form, so You could connect it to SPDIF and it also worked well (also tried with this Dysan CD-ROM).

[Umfriend]

Wasn't it the case that feeding the soundcard by the seperate cable you avoided CPU and memory-bandwidth utilisation? I think there was a time where such things mattered for CD-quality data.

[Nicram]

Wasn't it the case that feeding the soundcard by the seperate cable you avoided CPU and memory-bandwidth utilisation? I think there was a time where such things mattered for CD-quality data.

Yes, at those times play with ATA cable may had distortions made of other thins workin. Als the reason was that almost every cd-rom drive had button to play/pause audio cd. So i could use this to play music without any software turned on.

[cjolley]

Your old drive must have been pretty ancient

I'm starting to think I should wrap the thing in burlap and plaster and take it to a museum