Internal audio cables necessary?

E

ehZn

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 9, 2004
Messages
1,096
This may seem like a strange question, but what exactly is the use of the internal audio cabling that goes from cd drives to a PCI sound card? I know they can be either analog or digital, but are they necessary?

No important reason for asking, just curious.
 
Yeah, I've always wondered about that as well, I don't see much of a point since I doubt it improves performance or sound quality much these days.
 
You should only use the analog cable if your drive does not support Digital Audio Extraction (DAE), which is highly unlikely. Using the analog cable would mean that the drive itself would convert the sound to analog and then send it to your sound card, which would convert it back to digital for processing, then back to analog again for your speakers/headphones. Obviously an undesirable scenario. As for the digital output, there's no reason to use it because the drive can send the sound digitally over the IDE cable.
 
Well, the computer I installed Fedora Core 1 on didn't have the little cable running from the CD drive to the sound card, and I had to download a DAE plug-in. It was kind of annoying, but nothing to lose sleep over.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top