Section 7. Using AudioFS
Plextor Manager 2000 User’s Manual
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NOTE: At this time, no other SCSI CD-based drive and very few ATAPI CD-ROM
drives can stream digital audio directly to USB speakers in Windows 98. This makes
Plextor products the only SCSI devices that support this feature. (Plextor ATAPI
drives support it, too.) Windows 2000 supports this feature for both SCSI and ATAPI,
drives.
Why Use Digital Audio?
Your drive normally transmits an analog signal from the audio output to the sound
board. This can be limiting if you have more than one drive. You don’t want to open
your computer and re-connect the analog signal wire to another drive just to play a
CD. Furthermore, there is a limit to the number of devices that can be connected to a
sound board using analog connections.
Plextor Manager 2000 and Plextor drives allow you to play digital audio on
Windows 98 and Windows 2000 systems equipped with USB speakers. With this
combination of hardware and software, music from a CD is now played digitally
over the SCSI or ATAPI bus straight to your USB speakers. This provides you with
digital sound, which has a much better quality than that from the analog speakers
normally used with sound boards. Digital audio also allows for multiple drives to be
used as source drives, and has fewer restrictions caused by cabling.
What You Need for USB Digital Audio Sound
Discs that are supported by the Plextor Manager 2000 USB feature include:
•
Standard CD/DA audio music CDs
•
Enhanced music CDs such as CD Extra
•
Multimedia game CDs that have audio tracks on them
To take advantage of USB digital audio, you need the following:
•
Personal computer with USB support
•
Windows 98 or Windows 2000 installed on the PC
•
USB speakers installed on your system
•
Plextor Manager 2000 installed on your system
•
A Plextor drive installed on your system. These are the Plextor drives you can
use:
All Plextor CD-ROM drives starting with 4.5x, 8x, or higher
All Plextor CD-R and CD-RW drives starting with 4x or higher
Enabling USB Digital Audio Sound
To enable USB digital audio:
For Windows 98 users:
1. From the Start menu select Settings, then select Control Panel and click the
Multimedia icon. You see the Multimedia Properties screen.
2. In the Properties dialog box, select the CD Music tab and turn on Enable Digital
Audio.
