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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?
I just use my DVD player (which does mp3 cd's fine, has digital out and cost less then $150 18 months ago). I was impressed by my parents new midi system - 5 CD changer, reads file names, file/directory navigation, etc. etc. For now I'm happy with my DVD player, but were I into music large scale, I'd definatly invest in a proper CD deck.
Why anyone would spend $50+ on a high end CDROM drive is beyond belief!
Actually, I've never owned a CD-ROM that *didn't* output SDPIF (sp?). The Creative 12x DVD and AOpen 20x10x40 both have it on my computer, the dead CDROM in my tiny server has it ... no, wait, I have a crazy old Panasonic drive that doesn't have it, but it doesn't support IDE either. It's one of dem crazy weird buses.
ANYWAY, my point is that most CDROMs have a two pin "digital output" on the far left side, and that is a SDPIF output. With a little creative wiring, you should be able to hook it into a stereo. And I believe most IDE CDROMs work with only power. Of course, I'm talking internal drives here but you should be able to hammer something together.
Sure it does, why do people make sure they get good quality IDE cables (esp. for UDMA), why do we need good quality network cables and connections?
I think you'll find that for one pretty well anything will work for 100base-T. Gig is different, but you'll get away with murder at 100Mbit. And secondly that SPDIF is a far lower data rate than either. You could send the signals over a coat hanger and still have no appreciable loss.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Speaking of which, I run SPDIF between my pc and my receiver over a 50 foot length of speaker wire that I terminated with el-cheapo radioshack rca plugs. You can tell when it loses sync, 'cause the receiver will cut out for a moment and display "PCM 48Khz" briefly. Otherwise, it works well.
fnord.