Malik wrote:

Can the board (sound card or motherboard) be harmed if the wires are connected the other way round?

If the pinout is LGGR, then all you'll get is reversed channels.

If the pinout is LGRG or RGLG, it'll probably just be silent.

It's just line level audio, if you get the pins mixed up it just won't work.

Malik wrote:

And last but not the least, what about those "mini" 4-pin cd audio connector heads? Some of these come with 4 and some with 3 wires attached to the heads. Will there be any differences between these 3-wire and 4-wire connectors? And are there any differences from the usual larger connectors and these mini ones?

My CT2740 SB16 has one of these, it was for a Panasonic CD-ROM drive. The electrical properties are the same, it's just to prevent you from using bog standard cables.

The pinout is more likely to be LGRG, than the de-facto standard of LGGR.

Thanks for the information, SquallStrife! Appreciate it.

the panasonic/creative design uses the smaller white connectors... they use the LGRG pin setup.... early SB16s (low CT numbers) and SB Pros only have those connectors, not the MPC2 black connectors found on all later sound cards which uses the LGGR setup

the white sony connectors (rare now) uses LGGR also... it is exposed pins with a side locking tab... you can force an MPC2 cable to fit it just fine as the pin spacing is the same 😀

I believe the mitsumi connectors are setup like the panasonic ones... LGRG... not sure though because I never messed with a proprietary mitsumi drive

repinning the cables is pretty easy, I've done it many times back in the days

the 2 pin connectors are SPDIF input I believe... CD-ROM drives used to have that pretty common, but not anymore... the part that pisses me off about this is, I was NEVER able to find those 2 pin cables to get the better quality audio back in the days (and when it mattered most) but now I can but no one gives a shit anymore because now you can just "rip" on the fly to listen to a CD, completely bypassing the sound card for input

I only have a single 2-pin digital audio cd connector which came with my Audigy 2 ZS.

AFAIK there's nothing special about the digital audio cable, it's just two wires.

You could knock one up in a minute if you felt like butchering an old case's LED/reset button headers.

easy to do all of this now... back in the days hardware was expensive and precious... you wouldn't/couldn't hack up some old case button headers 😉