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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?
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.