BF2S Forums Digital CD to sound card cable

The third method is essentially Digital Audio Extraction (DAE). Your CDROM/DVDROM does not do any processing, but sends the raw data stream off the CD to RAM. Your system processor converts this to a stereo music format that is then sent down the PCI bus to the soundcard, where the soundcard plays it much like a wav file.

This method is supposed to produce the highest quality CD audio, and does not require any audio cable to be plugged into the drive, as all data is sent down the IDE cable. This method is called Digital CD Audio by Microsoft, and is available under certain versions of Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.