| Going Digital
Remember when a big, red letter A used to stand for Adultery? The
times have changed since then. Now, A stands for Analog. :)
Now, you may be surprised to learn that while CDs store digital
music, the signals reaching your sound card are analog in nature.
Yes, although the CD-ROM drive reads CD audio digitally, it converts
the digital signals into analog signals via the built-in DAC (Digital-to-Analog
Converter).
As the signal passing through the CD audio cable is analog,
electrical interference may distort the signal. To prevent this from
happening, the connection from the CD-ROM drive to the sound card
should be entirely digital. In addition, USB speakers only have a
digital input so if the CD-ROM's DAC is used, you won't be able to
listen to CD audio.
Windows 2000 supports digital reading of CD Audio data. The CD
Audio data is read by the CD-ROM and is sent directly to the sound
card or USB speakers, thereby bypassing the DAC. Here's how you can
enable Windows 2000's digital CD audio support.
- Go to System Properties by right-clicking My Computer
or via the Control Panel.
- Select the Hardware tab and you will see the screen
below :-
- Look at the Device Manager section and click on the Device
Manager button.
- This brings up the Device Manager screen.
- Expand the DVD/CD-ROM drives tree and you will see a list of
all the DVD or CD drives you have in your system :-
- Right click on the CD drive you are using for playing CD audio
and click on the Properties option.
- The CD drive properties page will then appear.
- Click on the Properties tab and you should see this screen
:-
- To enable digital CD audio support, just check the Enable
digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device checkbox and then
click OK.
- Windows 2000 may or may not then ask you to reboot. But
whether immediately or after rebooting, you will now be able to
listen to higher quality CD audio.
Notes
- Enabling digital CD audio support uses some (up to 150KB/s)
IDE and PCI bandwidth. So, if you are no audiophile and are more
interested in improving the speed of your system, then you might
want to disable digital CD audio support instead. Note
that the performance hit caused by digital CD audio support is
most likely unnoticeable (~ 0.4%).
(Thanks to maesus and gft for bringing this
matter up!)
- Michael Phillips
reported that his CD-writer could not burn CDs properly with
digital CD audio support enabled on that CD-writer. Personally,
I have not faced any problems with my own CD-writer with this
option enabled. However, this may be an issue affecting only
certain CD-writers so if your CD-writer won't burn CDs properly,
try disabling this option.
- Irrespective of whether you enable digital CD audio support or
not, you will ultimately still be listening to analog signals
since the sound card converts the digital signals to analog.
However, since the sound card's DAC (especially those found in
higher-end cards) is better than the CD-ROM's DAC, enabling
digital CD audio support will produce better CD audio
quality.
- This option is very useful for those who have more than one CD
readers (CD-ROM, CD-writers or DVD-ROM) because it enables all
CD readers in the same system to be used as audio CD players.
Normally, only the CD drive that is connected to the sound card
via the two-wire CD audio cable will produce sound.
- If you are getting some interference or noises after enabling
digital CD audio, reduce the bass and treble settings.
- After enabling digital CD audio, the volume of CD audio is now
controlled by the main volume control and not the usual CD audio
volume control.
Comments?
If you have a comment or question about this tip, please post
them here.
Thanks for your time and I hope this tip has helped you some! :)
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
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