Considering most of those older cdroms came with their own proprietary interface card, eg mitsumi, sony, panasonic,... Those cards often came equipped with the connector to add the cd audio and loop it through to the outside of the computer using either some RCA plugs or a 3.5mm jack, which you could then route into the line-in of your soundcard.

My first DOS system with CD sound was a 602X Pioneer external changer on a 1542 Adaptec with RCA's straight to an amp. I actually didn't have a sound card as I remember.

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-08-18, 15:32:

Specifically SB 2.0 and earlier cards before creative added CD audio headers. I realize today its a dumb question since [..] "

No no, it's a legit question.
As my biology teacher had once said: "There's no such thing as stupid questions, but only poor answers".

Before Sound Blasters and other soundcards had their CD interfaces, people used dedicated interface cards that came with the CD-ROM.

The Mitsumi Lu005s, an early, but popular low-end CD-ROM drive, had used one.
It had a connector for an audio cable, which was wired two a pair or RCA connectors on the bracket side.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Mitsumi_L … accessories.jpg

Before this, in the latw 80s, there were external CD-ROM drives like the Philips CDD-461.
They had their own RCA outputs and an internal amplifier and a headphones jack.
Interfaces to PC was SCSI or something proprietary.

https://radio-bastler.de/forum/showthread.php?tid=27

Jo22 wrote on 2023-08-18, 19:13:

No no, it's a legit question. As my biology teacher had once said: "There's no such thing as stupid questions, but only poor ans […]
Show full quote

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-08-18, 15:32:

Specifically SB 2.0 and earlier cards before creative added CD audio headers. I realize today its a dumb question since [..] "

No no, it's a legit question.
As my biology teacher had once said: "There's no such thing as stupid questions, but only poor answers".

Before Sound Blasters and other soundcards had their CD interfaces, people used dedicated interface cards that came with the CD-ROM.

The Mitsumi Lu005s, an early, but popular low-end CD-ROM drive, had used one.
It had a connector for an audio cable, which was wired two a pair or RCA connectors on the bracket side.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Mitsumi_L … accessories.jpg

Before this, in the latw 80s, there were external CD-ROM drives like the Philips CDD-461.
They had their own RCA outputs and an internal amplifier and a headphones jack.
Interfaces to PC was SCSI or something proprietary.

https://radio-bastler.de/forum/showthread.php?tid=27

Thanks that makes sense! For some reason I wasn't thinking of external SCSI either, which was probably a very common choice back then and would plug straight into the aux input on the cards.

This is also lost on many of us, but the old CD-drives had the 3.5mm audio output jack right on the front fascia of the drive. Hence, if you couldn't route the CD-audio through your soundcard, you could just plug your speakers or headphones directly into the drive. It worked for some games where the music played a bigger part than the sound effects (say, Secret of Monkey Island) - but you could also always play with the cabling to get simultaneous output.

Nowadays, the feature is rarely included any more.

This an old Mitsumi CR-ROM interface card I got awhile back. The board features stereo RCA jacks for audio.

There are also a couple wires that a pervious owner had soldered to the audio out pins presumably to connect it internally to a sound card.

leonardo wrote on 2023-08-19, 16:08:

audio output jack right on the front

Oh yeah that's right... Some even had media control buttons, so you could listen to your own music while doing, say, office stuff - no control software needed.

I had Thunderboard SB clone back in the day and personally answer is simple: I didn’t even have a CDROM drive in my DOS systems where I used that sound card. Most of my friends had the same situation, that is we either had 386s or 486s equipped with some early SB card or a clone at the time when CDROMs started to gradually become mainstream. Many new high end DOS systems were of course sold with one around 93-95, but it still wasn’t something I considered essential in any way and didn’t think that it was something that was worth the investment with the limited resources available for a young lad.

Not having a CDROM wasn’t an issue those days as many games which had a CDROM release, had also a floppy one. Many games were also distributed (pirated) through BBSs and because of slow dial up speeds those days, CDROM releases were pretty much out of the question anyways if you got your games through those shady means.

CDROM became ”mandatory” with the release of Win95. I got my first CDROM with my Pentium system I bought in 1995 and it had SB16, so problem solved. I don’t remember seriously wanting a CDROM during my DOS days, but with Pentiums and win95, it was pretty much something that was automatically added to the systems sold at that point without even asking it.

In our home, the CD had played a big role early on.
My dad had a music CD collection since from back of the 80s, for example.
Then there were Kodak Photo CDs and Shareware CD-ROMs..

The latter was my PC hobby, essentially. Browsing hundreds of MBs per disc each.
It wasn't just about software, but also music, sound effects, pictures and disk magazines, reviews..
MOD files, WAVs/VOCs, GIF/BMPs/TGAs from all over the world, FLI/FLC animations etc.

We also had a subscription to CServe, for accessing forums and certain downloads (drivers, patches, source code samples) etc., but the telephone bill/charge per transfered data in our place was high back then (by comparison).

Later on, I went online via Packet-Radio on CB..
But that's another story.