CD-rom hookup question

Is there more than one way to get the audio signal from a cd-rom? I'm getting a lot of subtle disbelief from folks when I say my cdrom and burner both worked fine without audio cables connecting them to the sound card. I have no idea how it was accomplished as I didn't build this computer, it was purchased used from a resale and repair shop. Is it possible to do without cables and still get reasonable sound?

 

This should only really effect you if you are playing cds from the rom drive

 

But I did play from the cd-rom drive with no problem.

 

Yeah it will still play the cable is usually just for digital sound reproduction

 

These days it doesnt really matter as the data is decoded from the CD digitally, using the IDE interface and not using the direct audio link to the sound card. It basically just connected the digital out of the CD player directly to the DAC (Digital to Analog convertor) of the sound card, in order for it to place CDs.

You only really needed this when you had applications that would send information to the CD to make it start playing a certain track from the audio out, without sending any data through IDE to the rest of the machine. With current day apps like Winamp or WMP, the program will read the data from the disk and decode that through software and play that through the sound card (and the sound cards DAC). Sound is fine, exactly the same as it would be with the cable, but it does use more system resources.