I got my hands on a NEC CDR-502 tower that was gonna get pitched from work. It has 7 CD drives in it. I have it attached to my computer with an Adaptec SCSI card (latest driver). I'm running Windows XPPro and the OS sees the additional drives just fine. I can pop a music CD in and it plays, however, Windows Media Player displays a message at the beginning stating it can't use digital mode and will have to use analog mode if I want to play the CD. I say OK to that and WMP starts the CD. It looks like it's playing because the progress bar is moving along, however, I'm not getting any sound. Anyone have any ideas on this? I put the music CD in the internal CDRom drive in the computer and it works just fine. My guess is it has something to do with the message WMP displayed and maybe this tower can't play music CD's - maybe it was just made for data. Just thought it'd be fun to dink with. I appreciate any thoughts/suggestions.
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NEC CD Tower to play music CDs
- Thread starter denacho
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Continuing on with what dakota81 said. Originally, CD sound needed a cable (analog) to connect the CD player to the computer's sound card. When PCI came along, this cable is no longer needed, audio (digital) is processed through the PCI bus. Since the tower isn't integral with the computer, you need an audio connection. Open it up and look at the back of a CD drive itself, you should see the audio connection (if you don't know which one it is, ask to see a drive at the store and they can tell you which one it is). You'll have to rig up a cable long enough to go from a CD drive to the CD audio input on your sound card.
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