Useless Little Cable

The Halk · 14 Dec 2008 at 13:19

Every time I buy a CD or DVD drive, there's always one of those little cables that goes from the drive to the motherboard or sound cards. I used to connect them, but I've not bothered for a while.

What are they supposed to be for?

siege2 · 14 Dec 2008 at 13:26

u put an audio cd in the drive, it allows u to play audio cds , the one's u play on your Hi fi, in car, cd audio player

The Halk · 14 Dec 2008 at 13:29

Ah. Useless for me then

siege2 · 14 Dec 2008 at 17:49

yep never much use for me either, prefer my incar FM usb transmitter ie put music as mp3's onto memory stick , plug into fm transmitter which plugs into cig socket"new would have a use for that someday" then it transmits on an FM frequency which u preset a allocation on your incar radio :-)

coupe69 · 14 Dec 2008 at 18:04

You haven't needed one of those cables for years. The system will transfer the sound as digital data through the drive cable to the sound card. Thats one of the things DMA is used for. You only need the cable if you want to do an inferior analog sound connection to the sound card.

Craig321 · 14 Dec 2008 at 18:04

siege2 said:
u put an audio cd in the drive, it allows u to play audio cds , the one's u play on your Hi fi, in car, cd audio player

I guess that means you can just play them without the need for software on the computer? Pretty pointless these days, it's easy enough to start up WMP/another music player and play the CD

Cybermyk · 14 Dec 2008 at 18:06

XP/Vista takes the audio signal through IDE/DMA. You would need them cables for older OS's though.

J.B · 14 Dec 2008 at 18:12

There was a thread about this the other week, might of been in GD.

I've seen someone in a car once, with a CD drive on top of their central unit with a lot of wires hanging out.
Computer are so powerful now adays, and the bus so wide, they are pretty pointless.