IDE CD Player

Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.
Why doesnt someone use a computer CD-Rom Drive and instead of using the SPDIF output use the IDE output of the drive and read the data many times to establish excellent error correction, essential treat the audio as data, like a computer...

Is this possible, you'd think with 52x cd-rom's you should be able to read the dat over 50 times before actually playing anything. You should also be able to reduce jitter considerably while keeping the cost down?

Is this fesible or would SCSI be easier (maybe their both impossible). How hard would it be to make an IDE controller, a screen, some controls which would then feed to some form of good digital output like AES/EBU or something...
 
s0rce said:
Why doesnt someone use a computer CD-Rom Drive and instead of using the SPDIF output use the IDE output of the drive and read the data many times to establish excellent error correction, essential treat the audio as data, like a computer...

Is this possible, you'd think with 52x cd-rom's you should be able to read the dat over 50 times before actually playing anything. You should also be able to reduce jitter considerably while keeping the cost down?

No, it wouldn't work, unless you use CDs that store the music
as data files. An ordinary music CD does not support rereading
in any reasonable way. The only thing you can do is to reread
a whole track and then it won't even be sufficient with a 52x drive
to catch up. By the way, you probably don't want a noisy
52x CDROM drive to play you music anyway.

Data CD is another thing, they store the data in blocks that can
be individually addressed and thus support efficient error
recovery by rereading data.
 
s0rce said:
But if I insert a Audio CD into my computer it plays it through the IDE connection (the analog audio is not connected) and I'm fairly sure that its the drive that determines if the audio can be read digitally not the cd.

Hmm, not too sure about that.. There are CD player programs that play audio CDs through the IDE interface and allow you to change the speed of the music, and stuff, but are you using a special program??
 
I think the CD drive is able to read a audio CD and the signal goes from drives DAC through a analog wire to the soundcard. Or it could give the digital signal to the computer and software does the decoding ands put this out via soundcard DAC. You could enable DAE in device manager / CD drive / properties and windows will play CD from IDE and not analog with the drives DAC. You could disable DAE there and it will play with the drives DAC via analog connection to soundcard.
 
The CD-Rom's DAC is only applicable if the analog cable is connecting the CD-Rom to the Soundcard and this is not the case, I was just using winamp and it played perfectly. So I beleive that this is possible and maybe a way of making a good cheap diy cd player.

I just dont have enough knowledge to build the entire thing myself.
 
s0rce said:
But if I insert a Audio CD into my computer it plays it through the IDE connection (the analog audio is not connected) and I'm fairly sure that its the drive that determines if the audio can be read digitally not the cd.

Yes that should be possible, given the appropriate software,
but the drive will not be able to go back and reread when it
wncounters read errors, which it can when reading a data CD.
 
Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.