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Thursday, January 31, 2008

Step 7: Attach the audio cable

Many older systems require an audio cable to connect your optical drive's four-pin analog output to an output on your sound card so that you can play audio CDs on your PC. This approach yields fine audio quality for most of us, but it's not ideal: PC optical drives typically don't contain hi-fi-quality digital-to-analog converters. Some sound cards and most current optical drives allow a digital connection between the two devices, but this connection is seldom used.

Many newer systems do away with the audio cable altogether. Recent versions of Windows support audio-CD playback using digital audio extraction, which lets the PC read digital data directly from the drive and perform the necessary digital-to-analog conversion. The biggest drawback of digital audio-CD playback: If there's a headphone jack on the front of the optical drive, it won't work when you play a CD.

On both of our test systems, which already used digital CD playback with no problems, we installed the new drive without an audio cable. If your current optical drive uses an analog cable and you want to add your new drive with the same type of connection, you may need to buy a Y connector; most sound cards allow only one analog input

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