I just bought an oem audigy 2. It arrived without the digital cable between the cdrom and the soundcard. I went looking for one at local shops and was told it made no difference when playing cds in windows xp. Is this true?
In practice it will usually make no difference but the ideal method is to use the cable for a direct connection and to avoid using the PCI bus. The only time I can think of that it might matter is when playing a game that also reads audio off the CD. Not every media player has support for the bus method -I don't think Winamp does.
Basically, you're looking at transferring the music over the cable from the cdrom to the soundcard... or transferring it over the IDE cable, through the motherboard's PCI bus, and to the soundcard... There is no difference in the sound quality nowadays. I doubt even 15% of the people on the forums use one of those cables.
In my current "older" rig I've got the DVD player linked via the digital cable to the sound card and the CD-RW linked via analogue.. and to be honist when listening to CDs the difference is not noticable.. Unless of course you have something like an Audigy card of any version and some really good speakers.. otherwise the difference is not noticable to the human ears..
The analog cable method should be clearly worst because it will be using the crappier DAC in the drive (as opposed to on the sound card or mobo) plus potentially introduce noise with the cable. On older drives lacking a digital output or cheapie sound cards or on-board chips (particularly AC97), the digital bus method is preferred to analog, and the primary reason it was introduced (better than analog but cheaper than direct digital).
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