From: gess@knex.Gwinnett.COM (Gess Shankar)
Newsgroups: alt.cd-rom
Subject: Re: sound boards and cd-rom
Date: 21 Aug 92 15:01:04 GMT
Organization: Knowledge Exchange, GA, US of A

jerry@incc.com (Jerry Rocteur) writes:

> In article <CDROM-L%92081618304959@UCCVMA.UCOP.EDU>, LBU05@UKANVM.BITNET (Jim
> > 
> >    There have been 2 questions on this list this weekend about the
> > Soundblaster and CD-ROM.
> > 
> > 1) Jerry Rocteur inquires:
> > >I have an ESDI controller and drive on my dos machine, so to add a
> > >cd-rom I get the SBPro card and the CD rom and I don't  have to buy a
> > >SCSI controller ??? Is this right ???
> > >Can I use the SBPro with _any_ cd-rom ?? if not which ones ??
> > 
> >    The SBPro has a proprietary interface that only works with a CD-ROM
> > marketed by Panasonic, Matsushita, and others.  It is NOT SCSI.  If you buy
> > the CD-ROM that Creative Labs sells, of course, you're fine.  The SBPro wil
> > work with any CD-ROM drive, however, as long as its own SCSI interface
> > card is installed.  On the other hand, the MediaVision Pro  Spectrum Plus
> > and 16 has a standard SCSI on the card that will interface with many drives
> Thanks for that, so I don't do it this way, what would you guys
> recommend, I have an ESDI controller and hard drive, so which CD rom
> and controller do I buy?????
> 
> 
> I *am* confused :-(
> -- 

Why the confusion?

You have the ESDI controller for your hard disk. As far as I know, you cannot
connect a CD-Rom to the ESDI. Therefore you need some sort of interface to
connect a CD-Rom drive.

The choices are:

(1) Proprietary Bus interface cards from: Hitachi (Hitachi bus), Sony (Sony Bus)
    etc. with matching Drives to go with the host adapter.
(2) A good general purpose SCSI interface card such as Adaptec, BusTek,
    Trantor etc., which will allow you to connect any SCSI device including
    SCSI cd-rom drives
The above two assume that all you want is access to CD-Rom drives and do not
intend to buy a sound card for multimedia use. If you do wish to buy a
sound card, then you have the choice of:
(3) a. Creative Lab SB Pro with proprietary interface and driver
    b. MediaVision PAS16 with SCSI interface (Trantor, I believe), which
       allows you to choose your own CD-rom drive from a range of SCSI
       drives available.

My own preference and recommendation will be:

Go with a SCSI host adapter such as the Adaptec 1542B. This allows you to
attach CD-Roms, Hard Disks and Tape Drives to that one controller giving
you some impressive expansion capability. You can even switch out your ESDI
to a SCSI Drive when it comes time to upgrade your hard disk and just go
SCSI all the way.

I like to keep the sound cards as sound cards and don't much care for the
SCSI add-ons, because driver support for such boards is usually limited to
CD-Rom support only and would like to select the sound card based on sound
capabilities.

But if you must combine a sound card and a cd-rom access to one card, then
probably ProAudioSpectrum-16 is the way to go.

GeSS
--
Gess Shankar      |<><>|Internet: gess@knex.Gwinnett.COM                |<><>|
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