How to make cd rom audio Y- cable?

[Graham]

Imanage,
Szech is almost right (sorry Szech).
You will find a white, a red and a black (usually) condutor in the plug. Red is the right channel, white is the left and the black (or other one) is common (0V).
You should be OK connecting white to white, red to red and black to black, I dont think you will do any harm to anything, especially as you already have a connector like it anyway (but I make no guarantee).
The connector on my CD drives ( they may not all be the same) are labeled R G G L, (right Ground Ground Left, the two grounds are the same/interchangeable).
You cannot use diodes in the lead as the signal is ac (diodes will cut half out), and there is probably not enough voltage to overcome the forward voltage drop of the diode anyway.

Go for it !!

G

[Imanage]

Does anyone know how to make a Y-cable for 2 cd-rom drives (DVD and CD-RW) into a single motherboard/sound card input (2 black connectors to 1)?
I bought a "combiner" for $8 but don't want to break the part where the two input cables are mixed into one output. I don't know if circuitry is involved or I can just wire the two together to make my own. Thanks.

[Szech]

Hello.

The four wires that connect the CD-ROM / DVD drive to the sound card are positive / negative feeds for the left channel and the right channel (two each channel). I don't remember which wire is which, but you can simply splice the wires to get the input from both drives. I doubt that the signal leaving one drive and going into the other drive will affect anything, but if you're edgy about it, you can hook up diodes to each wire leading out of the drives.

Enjoy http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[Imanage]

Thanks,

Are the output levels affected when you just splice the wires? I think I was doing something like that with my stereo system and things weren't right so I was leery about doing this.