Re: Audio cable requirement?

From: Charles Sullivan (cwsulliv_at_triad.rr.com)
Date: 05/28/04 

Date: Fri, 28 May 2004 15:11:28 GMT

On Fri, 28 May 2004 13:46:50 +0200, Måns Rullgård wrote:

> Charles Sullivan <cwsulliv@triad.rr.com> writes:
>
>> On Fri, 28 May 2004 08:58:56 +0200, Måns Rullgård wrote:
>>
>>> Charles Sullivan <cwsulliv@triad.rr.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> What determines whether an audio cable between
>>>> a CD reading device and onboard sound is required
>>>> in order to play audio CDs through the PC's sound
>>>> system?
>>>>
>>>> My old system has a DVD-ROM and Ensonic 1391 chip
>>>> onboard sound, and has been running RedHat versions
>>>> 6 through 9 over the years. It never needed an
>>>> audio cable to listen to audio CDs.
>>>>
>>>> My new system has a CD-RW and AC97 onboard sound,
>>>> and is running Fedora Core 2. MP3s on the hard
>>>> drive play fine, but I get no sound from Audio CDs
>>>> (except via earphones plugged into the front panel
>>>> jack on the CD-RW).
>>>>
>>>> Is it the CD reading device, the sound circuitry on the
>>>> mobo, or some configuration item in the OS that makes
>>>> the difference?
>>>
>>> Using the extra cable the CD drive does the digital to analog
>>> conversion and the sound is passed through the analog mixer of the
>>> sound card to the speakers. Without the cable the digital data has to
>>> be read from the CD, pass through the CPU, and be written to the
>>> digital input of the sound card. This obviously uses some CPU cycles
>>> and hogs the IDE bus, i.e. if the CD drive is sharing an IDE cable the
>>> other thing will perform sluggishly.
>>>
>>>> (The current problem is that the 18" audio cable
>>>> I have isn't long enough for the new tower case.)
>>>
>>> This is c.o.l.HARDWARE. Get out your soldering iron.
>>
>> I can do that, but my original question remains unanswered.
>> Any ideas?
>
> You probably need to configure your CD playing application to use
> digital transfer from the CD instead of just sending a play command to
> the drive. Which player are you using?

I've been trying gnome-cd from package gnome-media-2.6.0-1
as installed with Fedora Core 2. There's no obvious way of
configuring that to use digital instead of analog input.

However I just installed XMMS and that does have a configuration
screen allowing the choice. And after choosing digital it will
play audio CDs without the audio cable.

Many thanks for clearing up this issue in my mind.

Regards,
Charles Sullivan