spdif connection

[Gendibal]

I'm wondering if it's worth it to use the digital audio connection on my cdrw or dvd-rom. any thoughts?

[cfitz]

Yes it is worthwhile to use digital audio output. It will probably give you best quality sound, because your sound card's D/A converter is likely to be higher quality than the one in your optical driver.

You don't need to use the SPDIF connector on your drive if you don't have room on your sound card. You can get the digital data through the IDE cable just as well. Just go to device manager, right-click the drive, and select "Enable digtial CD audio for this CD-ROM device" on the "Properties" page.

You will find similar options in many player programs as well, such as Windows Media Player (check "Digital playback" in the "Playback Settings" area of the "CD Audio" tab of the Tools->Options window). In fact, if you see the visualizations in WMP, you already have digital playback enabled.

cfitz

[Flyer22]

Doesn´t that consume cpu...using the audio direct cable won´t be there much less cpu amd mem consumption??

[cfitz]

Not significantly so. You only need to transfer 150 KiBytes/sec on an interface that can support 100 to 200 times that rate or more. Even without DMA enabled it isn't a significant burden on the CPU. And memory usage isn't an issue at all since you aren't storing all the data, just buffering a few bytes at the most.

If we were still running 6502's or Z80's then transferring the data throught the IDE cable might be an issue (for more than one reason... ), but it isn't a problem for the systems we use today.

cfitz

[Flyer22]

Thankz.....

[cfitz]

You're welcome.

cfitz