computer cd drive as audio source

souter

Hi,
Yet again thinking about building that dream htpc, my current question is , if CDs are digital, will I get good (as good as CD gets) music quality from a bog standard multi-format optical drive?
I'm thinking a slim line DVD/CD player (writing wouldn't be neccessary, however....) plugged in to a decent amp, amp to provide 5.1 sound and bone shaking 2 ch stereo.
Or am I thinking wishfully again?

TIA

fcukme

Once you don't go really cheap it will be fine, some of the really cheap stuff have problems reading even partly worn cd-r disks. Much more important here is the quality of the sound card in the htpc. I know the amp does most of the work, but if the sound quality is poor to start with, the best amp wont be able to do much. A pc setup however will never be a good a high quality cd player usually used in separates.

ZENER

Sound like an interesting project - the sound card is critical for an application like this and on board sound simply will not cut the mustard.

I do the techy stuff for a local radio station where there was a CL Audio PCI 64D sound chip (on board)in the studio MP3 PC. We replaced it with a CL SB Live value - the difference was huge it was like a veil had been lifted from in front of the speakers and someone upgraded the sub !! The moral is DON'T SKIMP HERE !

Most if not all CDROM drives provide a 2 pin digital output next to the analogue connector, connect this to the SB Live or Audigy for a slightly better sound or at very least DO NOT USE the analogue connector because:-

* SH!T cable - SH!T screening - unreliable connection
* Subject to noise pickup from the computer cables around it
* Connects to the CDROM's audio circuitry which is poor quality.

Good luck with the project !

ZEN

silverside

WARNING - nerd speak coming up.
If you get a Good soundcard and have the drivers set up correctly, you can get sound to match most basic separates.
You should
- go for digital connection and playback in all your software
- avoid the windows Mixer (KMixer) and use direct output of the digital signal in 44.1KHz (Kernel streaming output) This needs drivers provided. Terratec support is poor, M-Audio supposedly better.

Good soundcard makes are Terratec and M-Audio.

AFAIK Creative cards while best for games, and fairly good for music, run at an internal rate of 48Khz, which means that all CD audio is resampled causing a little drop in sound quality.

You may get a little crosstalk so put your soundcard in a PCI slot away from all your other cards.

For best quality, take a digital feed from your soundcard into an offboard DAC (which is built into most home cinema amps). Optical/Coaxial doesnt really matter much.

Also, the quality of most 5.1 home cinema amps is less than that of normal stereo amps for listening to music. You may not be too bothered by this as it will still be a big step up from computer speakers/mini systems.

souter

Thanks for the replies - I should have remembered the sound card as the key component. Which could be a problem, as I'm wanting to do this using mini-itx ( http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=176792 ), which has it's sound on the motherboard. So to recast the question, any of you audiophiles have experience of the VIA audio?
Further to silverside, yeah I got a big shock when I first played cds thru my sony mini home cinema - they are crap. I don't use pc speakers, my reference point is my ancient pile of hifi seperates gathering dust up in the top room. So what I want is an amplifier that is first and foremost for 2ch audio, but can also do 5.1 to a tolerable degree.
And I'd rather one amp for this, as keeping clutter down is the key driver in this sceheme.

silverside

* I know nothing about VIA audio
* Marantz are supposed to be the best for 2channel sound among the reasonably-priced 5.1 amps

Guy:Incognito

ZENER wrote:

Most if not all CDROM drives provide a 2 pin digital output next to the analogue connector

ZEN

i was looking for the digital cable a while back but couldnt find one, anyone shed some light, cheers.

silverside

Many apps can take the digital output through software (across the PCI/IDE bus (you can tell i'm not a real techie ) - your media software may need a plugin/software settiing to take this - I'd say you are better off leaving the analogue cable unplugged and doing it all through software because if you get it working, you know its a digital feed, one less opportunity for noise to creep in.

If you can't figure it out yourself tell us what software you are using, I got it working with winamp and Microsoft mediaplayer without too much hassle.

tribble

There is some very confusing babble in a number of posts here.

Stuff you should know.

All modern CD/DVD drives have digital outs.
The quality of which does not vary as the drive is simply pulling the data off the disc and outputing it.
However, CD/DVD drives are not like ordinary CD players - if they come accross a scatch they will continue trying to read it, possibly resulting in skipping.

For this reason it is recommended that you not use the digital out on the drive.
Nor the analogue one as it going to be crap.

Best off using windows 2000/Xp and ticking the "enable digital audio extraction" (or some such, i have no cdrom in my machine atm) in the control panel>system>cd/dvd.
This will essentially rip the music via the IDE bus to ram and then output it to the sound card.
The advantage is that there is no skipping as the cd is ripped faster than playing speed.

Now you have two options from here.
1. Use any bog standard digital out sound card (most onboards these days) and feed it to an offboard DAC (digital to analogue converter €100-150) and from there to you amp - this is the highest quality option.
2. Use a decent sound card take it's analogue output and feed it to your amp. This should still give a resonable quality sound. An external sound card would be more preferable (less "noise").

I hope this makes some sense.

tribble

souter

Thanks Tribble, I think I see where I want to go - take digital out of soundcard and convert to analogue externally.
Just a couple questions: where would one get a DAC? Are there any A/V amps with an integral DAC? And any ideas if linux supports cd to soundcard via IDE (or whatever it was you described)?

jozi

Regarding on-board sound, the sound from a nforce2 motherboard is as good if not better than a soundblaster live.
So either go for a nforce2 board or a soundcard better that the sb live.
I run all sound of my pc (on-board nforce2) trough my stereo amp, no probs and sound good enough for me anyway.

Jozi