Is there a headphone jack in the front? I think newer drives are all digital. There's no DAC circuitry present at all.

Errius wrote:

I think newer drives are all digital. There's no DAC circuitry present at all.

I think the same. If my memory serves, digital Audio-CD (CDA) playback started somewhen around the Windows 98 days.
Back then it was an optional feature (device manager->CD drive->properties) and several older Windows titles still
used MCI commands to tell the CD-ROM drive to play a given track. Windows XP still supported analogue playback, I think.

Does that mean I will get music to play from the DVD drive without the cable that goes to the sound card? I know of only a hand full of games that need the cable to the sound card one of them is monkey island 1 for music playback for the floppy version

From my notes (which may be wrong):

CD Audio cables are required for the computer to read CD audio in MS-DOS, Windows 95, 98 and NT, but beginning with Windows ME and 2000, the OS reads audio from the drive in digital format by default, so that music and data use the same circuitry, and a separate analog audio cable is no longer required. However, ME and 2000 allow drives to be individually configured to output either analog or digital audio, in case (e.g.) the user wants to listen to CDs using the front headphone jack socket. Modern drives are fully digital and no longer contain any analog circuitry.

According to my personal experience, even late PATA optical drives have no "audio output thru cable" option. Some of them even have the audio connectors there, but cannot output audio thru them. Expecting SATA drives to do that is a bit optimistic I guess.

I clearly remember a PATA drive with audio connectors installed but a factory imprinted sign on it that is saying "audio connectors are not functional".

OT: apparently Windows NT can't read CD audio from SCSI drives. IDE drives are OK. Is this a bug or deliberate? Did Microsoft ever explain the reasoning?