Slashdot Mirror
CD-ROM Drives that Can Be Used as Standalone Players?
An anonymous reader asks: "I am using an older, standalone CD-ROM drive as my audio CD player in my sound system. It is a NEC 4X SCSI in a small case with power supply. The case outputs very clean analog audio, great headphone output and a SPDIF coax link which plugs directly into my receiver. It works great standalone, it has a complete front panel, ie backlit LCD display, stop, play, pause, next and previous track buttons. But it doesn't read CD-RW, it uses a caddy and it heats up the CDs quite a bit. I know that all recent CD-ROM drives have only the eject button, not all of them output SPDIF (and with DRM who knows what the future holds) and who knows if they will work with only the power connected? Which CD-ROM drives, old or new, support being used standalone, have a decent set of front panel controls (at least a play and a skip button) and output SPDIF?" Generally for this type of purpose, I'd use a regular old portable CD player, but these generally do not output to SPDIF, either. Has anyone managed to find decent examples of either piece of hardware?
What the hell is this "SDPIF" that you keep going on about?
I've heard of SPDIF - Sony Philips Digital Interface - but I can't find any info online on this new-fangled interface that you've got on your Creative and AOpen drives.
Could you please elaborate with some detailed technical information for the less enlightened amongst us?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
i have an old NEC 3x cd rom drive that works good as a standalone, it has RCA out and headfone out, it also uses the ghetto caddys, wether it plays CD-RWs, i don't know b/c i have a real cd player that incidently dosen't play cd rws