It's been so long since I've looked into this stuff ... but I have a vague memory that some early CD drives had a connector for audio output decoded by the drive internal electronics (after all CD was originally designed for storing digital audio not data)

As for IDE<>SATA, I would think that both would be more than enough for audio streams ... errors would be unacceptable on either.

But I don't know intracies of current methods of extracting audio tracks from CDs - perhaps IDEs support a method that Sata doesn't?

Most SATA drives do not have an audio output.
If you use the headphone jack on the front or the sound card output on the back, quality is dependent on the DAC inside the drive. If you use the SPDIF output, you'll get pretty much the same thing out of any drive (unless the disc is in poor shape and the drive has bad error concealment).

DaveDDS wrote on Today, 13:58:

It's been so long since I've looked into this stuff ... but I have a vague memory that some early CD drives had a connector for audio output decoded by the drive internal electronics (after all CD was originally designed for storing digital audio not data)

As for IDE<>SATA, I would think that both would be more than enough for audio streams ... errors would be unacceptable on either.

But I don't know intracies of current methods of extracting audio tracks from CDs - perhaps IDEs support a method that Sata doesn't?

My PC knowledge is pretty much foggy pre-2014 as I grew up a console kid but considering that I do have a few different optical drives (DVD, Blu-ray, UHD, IDE, SATA) now, I've noticed and used the CD Connector before but I don't know enough details on why modern retro enthusiast still use it. Maybe that's the key to why you can find these IDE display connectors rather than SATA ones. I'm also wondering, if you go with an IDE to SATA converter, if you defeat the purpose of the project because there might be something better with using the IDE drives.

From past articles and forums that I've read, you get these kind of weird scenarios with things like consoles, especially SONY. Where there first 2 versions of a given console have the more premium optical drive, but then as they bring the prices down, they switch to standard drives due to the assumption that the extra features won't be used and it's worth cutting the cost.

jmarsh wrote on Today, 14:42:

Most SATA drives do not have an audio output.

aaahhhhhhhh, ok. I may need to see if there are any videos or written out guides on what the connector does and doesn't do to better understand it all.

iiamsiincere wrote on Today, 14:47:

jmarsh wrote on Today, 14:42:

Most SATA drives do not have an audio output.

aaahhhhhhhh, ok. I may need to see if there are any videos or written out guides on what the connector does and doesn't do to better understand it all.

Around Windows 2000 times, PCs switched from "analog" to "digital" audio CD playback.

Digital means that the audio CD is "ripped" (the 44100 Hz x 2 channels x 16 bits per sample uncompressed audio data) into memory, sent out to the sound card, and then thrown away.
If someone wanted to upload a track to a filesharing site, they would start with the same process, but instead of playing it and throwing it away, the audio data would be fed into an MP3 encoder instead.

Older PCs didn't have the bus/memory bandwidth or CPU time to spare to do this. Instead, they just send a command to the drive saying "play track 1", and the drive, like a CD player, just outputs analog sound either to the front headphone jack or the rear internal jack. The rear internal jack has a little bypass cable going directly from it to the sound card, so the CD audio is just another analog source that gets mixed in to the sound card's output.

jakethompson1 wrote on Today, 14:56:

Around Windows 2000 times, PCs switched from "analog" to "digital" audio CD playback. […]
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iiamsiincere wrote on Today, 14:47:

jmarsh wrote on Today, 14:42:

Most SATA drives do not have an audio output.

aaahhhhhhhh, ok. I may need to see if there are any videos or written out guides on what the connector does and doesn't do to better understand it all.

Around Windows 2000 times, PCs switched from "analog" to "digital" audio CD playback.

Digital means that the audio CD is "ripped" (the 44100 Hz x 2 channels x 16 bits per sample uncompressed audio data) into memory, sent out to the sound card, and then thrown away.
If someone wanted to upload a track to a filesharing site, they would start with the same process, but instead of playing it and throwing it away, the audio data would be fed into an MP3 encoder instead.

Older PCs didn't have the bus/memory bandwidth or CPU time to spare to do this. Instead, they just send a command to the drive saying "play track 1", and the drive, like a CD player, just outputs analog sound either to the front headphone jack or the rear internal jack. The rear internal jack has a little bypass cable going directly from it to the sound card, so the CD audio is just another analog source that gets mixed in to the sound card's output.

Oh ok. This makes more sense as to why you would want an IDE drive instead as you want to send the "analog" information straight to the output (whether powered or passive speakers). I hope I'm understanding that correctly.

Yes, and it also makes it easy to play .wav (potentially at a different sample rate or number of channels than the CD audio) sound effects over top of the background audio CD track, since the mixing is just done in analog on the sound card.

jakethompson1 wrote on Today, 16:09:

Yes, and it also makes it easy to play .wav (potentially at a different sample rate or number of channels than the CD audio) sound effects over top of the background audio CD track, since the mixing is just done in analog on the sound card.

You're referring to the Drive being used in a normal computer setting correct? In this case, in regards to the DIY project I found, it would strictly be used as a CD player/Transport device.

Yes, you will speak ATAPI to the drive which is essentially SCSI over ATA.
Within the ATAPI layer are SCSI MMC commands you can look up.
For an example here, Re: Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS? is the SCSI MMC "set cd-rom speed command" (to slow down noisy modern drives), which ends up being the bytes, BB 00 05 88, to set a transfer rate approximating 8x.
There are other MMC commands to play audio tracks.
Note there were some IDE CD-ROM drives with playback buttons on their front next to the headphone jack, that might already do exactly what the DIY project does.

Yup. This is just re-adding analog cd audio functionality to a cdrom drive.

Vintage drives have this functionality. Modern drives do not, because digital mixing is easier and cheaper.

Analog *used* to be easier and cheaper.

Some CD and possibly DVD drives also had a 2-pin digital audio out next to the 4-pin analog audio out.

For the analog audio out, the drives have a DAC built-in.

SATA drives , as mentioned earlier, mostly eliminated the audio out ports on the rear of the drive as the OSes then just grabbed the data from the audio tracks and used software or hardware to play back the CD audio tracks.

IDE drives can also do this, but it is dependent on the OS. Looks like prior to Windows 98 and early Linux don't have the capability to do this. This is why the audio out connections were on the back of the drives.

Having the audio going through the data connection is called digital audio extraction (DAE) or digital CD audio.