SPDIF help

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Bigbacon

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Jul 12, 2007
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I can't find anything about it on this AM3 motherboard I have but there is a connector on the board which seems to be for CD in but it is also labeled HDMI/SPDIF

it is a 4 pin connector. the current board in my media PC has SPDIF coax audio out and it is a 3 pin connector.

so, do they make a 4 pin coax header and how do I determine if it actually has this ability?

this is the board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813153185R

if you look at the third picture and do the hover/zoom thing. just above and between the two PCI slots there is a 4 pin connector and you'll see it says CDIN/HDMI/SPDIF
 
If anybody has a connector for such a header it would be monoprice. :D
 
When I wanted to get spdif out working, I wasn't able to find a cable that was reasonably priced. Instead I found a slot cover with an RCA jack and soldered the leads from an old power led. This was also useful because there isn't really a standard pinout, so i could potentially re-use the thing in another computer. Check the manual for the motherboard, it should tell you which pin is spdif out, and which is ground.
 
see that is the thing, the maunal doesn't say anything about SPDIF and only has the pin out for CDIN but that connector on the board is labeled with all 3 things.
 
Wow, that manual is pretty much garbage. My guess would be that the 4 pins are power, ground, audio in, and spidf out. If you have a multimeter, you should be able to find ground pretty easily, and then power. Ground you can find by continuity. Power should be 5v or 12v DC. Audio out should be ~ 100 mV, if you've got a signal going to it (should be an audio setting to enable SPDIF; if you can't find a setting for that, don't bother trying to find the signal).

If you can't tell which pin is power, you probably don't want to just try connecting it to your receiver, but if you can narrow it down so two pins are either input or output, just try them both... one should work. If you want to really wing it, you can just hack the end off any rca cable you have hanging around and hook that up. (I would recommend at least putting headers on the ends though, cause it'll be pretty easy to short otherwise)
 
thanks for the multimeter suggestion. I can totally try that.

EDIT:
stupid me I should ahve looked first. Looks like when you enable digital audio, it uses one of the rear jacks for pass through. so it looks like a need a mono 3.5 male to RCA female or male either one.
 
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