Order of devices and sound?

[jch216]

Hey,

I'm building my computer and the sound is already onboard. The dvd player or the cd/rw came with an analog sound cable. Do I need to hook this into the mobo? And if I do need to, which device should it be hooked to on the other end?

I have my cd/rw as master, then the dvd player as slave, then hooked into mobo using the ribbon cable.

EDIT:
And what is this "Cable Select" jumper setting?

RE-EDIT:
And if you're looking at the gray ribbon. Should the top connection be the slave device, then the master device, then into the mobo?

[originel]

i'm not sure if you have a plug to plug either player into your sound, but if you do it will be 4 pins wide, 1 pin deep. and it doesn't matter which order they are plugged in. basically all those do is take a digital sound output and plug it into a digital input, so if it's not plugged in, no sound. so to get soound from both you need to connect both. one thing to note tho is this only affects audio cds AFAIK, so your dvd playback should be fine and of course all your mp3s and such should be fine.

what Cable select does is tell the bios to determine if the drive is a master or slave be looking at where it is plugged in on the IDE cable (the end plug is master and the middle is slave). it doesn't always work for me tho so i always excplicitly set which drive it is anyways.

EDIT: in response to your edit () if you explicitly select if a drive is master/slave then it doesn't matter where you put it on the cable

[DoctorReno]

Cable Select is a standard that never caught on. It was intended to make things simple by configuring the devices as Master or Slave automatically depending on which connector on your ribbon cable you connected the device. Thus no need for jumpers. It takes a special cable and most IDE cables are not CS.

There will be a plug on your MoBo for the analog cable to plug into. As to which device I think that will be up to you. I don't know which device should be master and which should be slave or if it even matters.
If you have Win2k or XP you should be able to set the devices to play digitally and not need the analog cable.

I will be interested to see what some others recommend and why.

[jch216]

Ok, I have the wire with a 4 pin plug on each end like you said. But there is only 1 place on the mobo to plug this in. And I have 2 devices that could use this wire. If I understood you correctly I need to plug this into the master cd/rw, and the slave dvd/rom will be fine without it.

[jch216]

That would be awesome. I have way too many cables running around this thing as it is. I have used a SATA adapter on my harddrive and plugged the HDD to the mobo with a SATA cable.

I have windows XP home edition.

[PresterJohn]

if you want to be able to hear audio on both the cdrw and the dvd you'lll have to buy a pci sound card...almost all nowadays have with multiple input support.

since your onboard sound only has 1 connector, i would connect the dvd (assuming the dvd drive gets more 'audio' usage (playback of dvd movies...)

[JPMiller]

I will find you a link to support what I'm saying but it may take awhile... most people..(not all)..recomend having the CDRW set as the slave to any other optical drive when there are two.
I cannot remember the exact reasoning behind this but I remember it made sense. Before I used this advice I had had problems with having it jumpered as the Master drive.
I have religiously set it as slave since and stopped having any problems. This may be an older, now moot issue but I will find the info. I'm referring to.
Anyone remember this or know what the heck I'm talking about?

[jch216]

I thought I read somewhere that the faster device should be master.....I'm probably imagining it though. lol

[DoctorReno]

I think the faster refers to HD's not optical or zips etc.
I think it does make a difference if one of the devices is DMA or a faster DMA.. in which case the higher speed DMA should be the master. Hmmmm..... I guess that in a way is saying the faster device should be master.

JP: I have heard that too and I would like to get a definitive answer someday. The manual for my HP RW drive wasn't specific when I referenced.
PM me if you ever come across the answer. Bottom line is if you had problems one way and not the current way then you are doing something right.