Digital Music, From Digital CD's

[Dehcbad25]

Even though audio CD's store the music in digital format, most of the time the music you hear is analog. The reason behind this is, when the information is moving from the CD-ROM to your sound card it is first passed by a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) which can possibly degrade the quality of the sound you're listening to. Fortunately Win2k/XP also support digital reading of audio CD's.

To enabled digital reading we'll have to change some of the CD-ROM settings in the device manager. Right click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop and go to properties. From there click the "Hardware" tab and then the "Device Manager" button. Once the Device Manager window opens, expand the "DVD/CD-ROM drives" by clicking the + sign next to it. Next, double click on the CD drive which you use to listen audio CD's from. Once inside there select the "Properties" tab and check the box next to "Enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device". You may have to reboot your system for the changes to take effect.After that's done, all the CD's you listen to on your computer will no longer first be converted to analog before it reaches your ears.

PS: please lets no go into the Digital/Analog discussion again :p I think everyone nows understand about that by now, or somehow understand :D

[FastGame]

Originally posted by Dehcbad25
PS: please lets no go into the Digital/Analog discussion again :p I think everyone nows understand about that by now, or somehow understand :D
Sorry Dehcbad25 I can't resist :p

As far as I know & correct me if I'm wrong, the "Enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device" is for using the digital cable from the CD-ROM directly to the sound card and bypassing the PCI buss in doing so. This is useful if using the digital out on the sound card to an external DAC because you don't use CPU cycles from the PCI transfer, you save a bit of CPU in anolog out also. If you don't have that cable going from the CD-ROM directly to the sound card then "Enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device" has no effect what so ever...

Of coarse we all understand ;)that once the signal reaches the speakers it's always Anolog :)

[egghead]

ahhh? whats audio cd's?

[cash_site]

Thats what I thought to FG, that enable digital audio was for the SP-DIF cable directly from CD to Soundcard or even new MB with SP_DIF.

Else the audio goes through the IDE cable, right?

[FastGame]

You got it cash_site :)

[Dehcbad25]

LOL FG
Yes, you have to have the audio cable going from the drive to the sound card. You don't have to use the digital output of the sound card to take advantage of this, since connecting directly to the sound card saves CPU. Most will use it just for that reason anyways.
And as EH said (EggHead) what is an audio CD??
I haven't use one on the PC for months. That's why I record everything in MP3. I hate changing CDs