I know with newer sound cards and optical drives you can enable Digital CD Audio Output in Windows 9x via the control panel. Might be worth a try?

Unfortunately, that option is greyed out. I am using an AWE64Value. Do any SATA to ATA bridge adapters have an analogue out header?

I don't think you get something like that. I've seen SATA <-> IDE adaptors for Laptop Optical drives that have connectors on them that suspiciously look like analogue connectors, but I couldn't verify that they are.

I think the only way to do that is opening the drive to see if there is any solder spots to get analog audio out.
I've seen many SATA drives and none of them had that physical connector as the IDE drives

I've also had no luck. Sticking with IDE drivers because of this. Note that also a lot of new IDE drivers don't support analogue audio out. Even drives with connectors, they simply don't work. I got a Samsung DVD-RW that does this.

If I remember correctly a PCI card is required to extract digital audio without having the drive perform D/A and sending to the soundcard. I know that every PCI-equipped system I have will work this way, and I've never had trouble with USB or SATA based drives in such machines. As far as grabbing the analog out from a PATA<->SATA adapter, that sounds impossible without a fairly complex (read: expensive) device. Much easier to either upgrade the soundcard or get a compatible PATA optical drive.

Jr_ wrote:

I think the only way to do that is opening the drive to see if there is any solder spots to get analog audio out.
I've seen many SATA drives and none of them had that physical connector as the IDE drives

That is a good idea. So I took it apart. Here are the photos. There does appear to be some kind of missing connector, but it looks to be a two pin connector, which would likely be for a digital audio cable. There is this other block of solder pads next to it though, perhaps analogue audio?

I've always been curious about it. AFAIK the drive still responds to the audio playback commands, there is just nowhere to get the sound from. Does PATA drives have special circuitry to handle áudio? Does the optic units have dedicated lines in their connectors to the board to send analog áudio? If so, could these be soldered and sent to a separate board piggybacking the drive? Oh well, sadly enough I'm out of spare SATA drives that I can open and wreck. I do have a spare PATA one that isn't reading disks though, when I have the time I should open it up and study it.

2-pin is generally for digital audio, yes. In order for analog to work it will require a complete D/A circuit with output opamps and so forth - does it have any of that componentry available?

alexanrs wrote:

I've always been curious about it. AFAIK the drive still responds to the audio playback commands, there is just nowhere to get the sound from. Does PATA drives have special circuitry to handle áudio? Does the optic units have dedicated lines in their connectors to the board to send analog áudio? If so, could these be soldered and sent to a separate board piggybacking the drive? Oh well, sadly enough I'm out of spare SATA drives that I can open and wreck. I do have a spare PATA one that isn't reading disks though, when I have the time I should open it up and study it.

Yes it's a special circuit - it has a D/A converter to handle digital audio from the CD, and send it out to the soundcard (or whatever) via the 4-pin connector. It's usually not the greatest quality D/A converter, but it's better than nothing of course.

But I believe the 2-pin digital audio stuff probably requires way less circuitry, perhaps even coming directly from the optic drive? If so, one coud produce a small D/A board to get analog audio out of it.

BTW, I've once seen a SATA optical drive with a 2-pin connector claiming it as a service/debug port and that it shouldn't be used.

alexanrs wrote:

But I believe the 2-pin digital audio stuff probably requires way less circuitry, perhaps even coming directly from the optic drive? If so, one coud produce a small D/A board to get analog audio out of it.

You can't directly take the digital feed from the transport - the 2-pin is outputting PCM audio. It's more resistant to noise and interference than analog, but requires D/A circuitry to exist somewhere on the sound-card or wherever else. In theory you could feed that into a D/A converter and then along into a soundcard, but again that's probably more hassle and expense than finding a PATA drive that has the right connectors, or a PCI card that will do bus audio. Another possible solution is if the motherboard has integrated audio, it may support digital audio over the bus.

BTW, I've once seen a SATA optical drive with a 2-pin connector claiming it as a service/debug port and that it shouldn't be used.

😲

The PCB contains 3 integrated circuits, all of which I have been unable to locate spec. sheets for. They are,

BD19960

NEC
MC-10045
1005EB001

R2A3
0253
SP

The MC-10045 seems to be the proprietary Sony Optiarc chip. Without the spec sheet, I cannot determine if the analogue audio functionality is integrated into this chip.

As none of the pins in that 7-pin solder pad block were ground pins, I am assuming there is no missing analogue audio header. For those 2 pins which comprise of the missing CN4 header, one is ground. I am left with no alternative but to remove the SATA drive in favour of an older ATAPI drive with analogue audio.

check out this drive backpanel, it's a ASUS DRW-2014L1T. Might be a good candidate for a modification to see if it works.

So, feipoa, have you made any progress?

why not get an ide drive, I can buy working IDE optical's all day for 2-3 dollars

Well, there are advantages to using SATA drives over IDE ones, one of them being the newer SATA drive isn't likely to suffer from mechanical problems.

Evert wrote:

So, feipoa, have you made any progress?

I did not experiment further with this.

Back in the day's we had cd players hooked up directly to the PC.
Thus skipping the stereo system.
That was way before cd drives were cheap enough. Circa 1990 to 1993.

Evert wrote:

Well, there are advantages to using SATA drives over IDE ones, one of them being the newer SATA drive isn't likely to suffer from mechanical problems.

I'd agree that new drives are far less likely to have problems due to wear, but many of the older drives were made better--they sold at retail prices significantly higher than the modern $15 SATA DVD burners, which are mostly plastic and very cheap metal.

That said, I really like SCSI optical for old systems because the SCSI drives were some of the highest quality made. They also have the analog audio outputs. A nice Adaptec SCSI controller can be had on eBay for $15.