CD Audio Splitter

[CDR_Xavier]

Hello.
I am building a PC with multiple soundcards -- a Diamond Monster Sound MX300, and a Sound Blaster CT4830.

The motherboard also has onboard audio, and the CD drive also have an audio connector.

 

My first question is, what is the "CD in" for the soundcard (and the motherboard)? What is the "audio out" (backplane, not audio jack) on the CD drive, and what is the audio jack on the CD player? (ok my specific unit did not come with one, but many others do).

 

My second question is ... one sec let me explain what is going on.

I have found an old "CD audio cable" that goes from your standard 4-pin CD audio to a standard 4-pin CD audio (so a CD to motherboard, usually), except it also have a mini-4-pin CD audio connected in parallel (so the three are all connected together). Now I know mini-4-pin for CD audio exist, my motherboard has one, but:

 

Is it possible a bad idea to connect the CD audio to multiple soundcards with this cable? What do I need to do if I want sound from my CD to go to both/all of my soundcards?

[Zando_]

Do you mean a 5.25" disc drive as the "CD drive"? Those typically talk to the motherboard via SATA, the sound out is whatever sound card/device you have set as the active one in the OS. 

[manikyath]

are you building some sort of retro machine here? this is a thing that happened back in the days of IDE CD drives, because in essence it let the CD drive act as a CD player, bypassing the computer itself and get mixed straight into the sound card's output, so that you could play CD quality music without loading the IDE interface with all that data. (and for the day, a CD was a LOT of data)

[CDR_Xavier]

17 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

a 5.25" disc drive as the "CD drive"? Those typically talk to the motherboard via SATA, the sound out is whatever sound card/device you have set as the active one in the OS.

Yes. In this case it has an IDE interface (except its actually not IDE it is ATAPI same goes for SATA).

 

But those drives usually have a 4-pin (and a 2-pin) "Audio" .. aah what do they call it
The 4-pin on the back is the "Analog Audio" and the 2-pin is the "Digital Audio". I would imagine they are intended to be plugged into motherboards and/or soundcards for analog sound (from the disk being played)?

Playing audio from a disk drive can probably be done in two ways. You can play it from the OS (as a file), and the OS will just output to whatever i tell it to output, but you also have audio from the CD drive (somewhere I was told the CD drive can operate alone without the presence of a SATA/IDE at all, and just outputs music from the music channel). In which case I would probably need this cable.

I assume it can do both, since you can find quite some SATA 5.25 inch CD/DVD drives that still have these.

 

But, as you can see, I will have multiple soundcards. I want to know how to wire it to have sound coming from multiple cards, if possible.

[cmndr]

1. You probably don't need multiple sound cards. You could probably even get away with the cheapo built in on board sound if it's a modern system.
2. CD drives used to play sound directly by playing the CD as an audio stream as opposed to a set of files. The line out bit was for connecting the CD drive to other things if desired.

As others asked... what kind of system is this? I haven't installed a CD drive in like 10 years.

[CDR_Xavier]

6 minutes ago, cmndr said:

You probably don't need multiple sound cards. You could probably even get away with the cheapo built in on board sound if it's a modern system.

They are not necessary for audio, they are for the MIDI port. Only a foolish person will actually install 2 of what's effectively the same audio cards for the sake of PC audio.

 

7 minutes ago, cmndr said:

what kind of system is this?

I call it "Retro Centre" (or center). It's a discarded SuperMicro full-tower I came across, and I decide to use it for old retro PC things. Old MIDI devices, 3.5 floppies, 5.25 floppies, Zip Disks, and some GamePort (they are the same) stuff.