Let's say you have two sound cards but one cd drive, how would you get cd audio to both cards? Would a Y cable work?
I guess you could route the output one card into another's input as well
What about if you had 2 or 3 cd drives and one sound card? Would a Y cable still work?
I'm not sure a Y-cable of the kind you describe exists, though it would be easy enough to make. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work, as long as both drives weren't trying to play audio at the same time.
Lots of Windows software was not written in anticipation of the presence of multiple CD drives, so you might have a hard time trying to get CD audio out of both drives in that situation.
An analog Y-cable without a switch sounds like a bad idea to me, since it seems like the CD-ROM's audio circuit would drive both inputs. Don't know.
I've thought about using a SPDIF connection for one card and analog for the other.
wrote:An analog Y-cable without a switch sounds like a bad idea to me, since it seems like the CD-ROM's audio circuit would drive both inputs. Don't know.
That was my thought.
You need (at a minimum) a passive current summing mixer circuit, otherwise the two line outputs will fight each other to set the overall voltage to the input. This can be done with fixed value resistors.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Passive-Audio … Volume-Control/
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
wrote:Let's say you have two sound cards but one cd drive, how would you get cd audio to both cards? Would a Y cable work?
I guess you could route the output one card into another's input as well
If the cable from CD drive to sound cards provides audio only, a Y-cable should work.
What about if you had 2 or 3 cd drives and one sound card? Would a Y cable still work?
No, you need a mixer.
wrote:An analog Y-cable without a switch sounds like a bad idea to me, since it seems like the CD-ROM's audio circuit would drive both inputs. Don't know.
I've thought about using a SPDIF connection for one card and analog for the other.
That's a good idea, if both sound cards lack SPDIF inputs you can alway buy a DAC from eBay for $5 and modify it.
wrote:wrote:What about if you had 2 or 3 cd drives and one sound card? Would a Y cable still work?
No, you need a mixer.
If the sound card got multiple internal inputs you can use the card as a mixer.
Some Soundcards have input for more than one CD-Rom-Audio.
And some Soundcards have an Aux Input too that you can use.
You can also build a Cable to use the Line-Input of the Soundcard.
Just to clarify few things about line-level analog audio:
1) it is usually OK to drive multiple inputs from one source (can connect one CD drive to 2-3 sound cards easily)
2) it is usually NOT OK to connect multiple outputs together (even if one output is not playing anything, it's still NOT OK. Two outputs fighting over each other, this is never OK. Please tell me why people think this is OK?)
3) sound cards with multiple CD-ROM connectors is still just one CD-ROM input with three different connectors
So only feed audio to one CD-ROM connector on sound card, so you can't connect two CD-ROMs to one sound card this way. However, a sound card with multiple CD-ROM connectors could be used to forward the audio from CD-ROM drive to second sound card as well, as the connectors are just wired together.
For the second CD-ROM audio, you must use one of either:
-AUX input (they might have same connector than CD-ROM input)
-LINE input jack on bracket
-switch on front panel or rear panel to select which one will feed audio to CD-ROM input
-mix audio of two drives together with resistors
-use SPDIF for the other drive
