[Porksoda]

Hey all,

While rummaging through the basement of my school, I found one of those external 5.25" drive enclosures with the power supply and everything built in. I'd like to use it as a transport of my uber-system that I am developing, but I am unsure of the best way to go about this.

Should I look into upgrading the 5V rail of the power supply to quiet the digital out? Should I feed the digital out directly to the BNC connector, add a buffer, or use transformer coupling?

Also, does anybody know of CD-ROM drives that allow for external play/stop/next/previous/etc. type controls from their rear panel? I'd like to add some front panel controls and possibly remote control at some point in the future.

Any recommendations for good optical drives or any other mods would be much appreciated!


Thanks!

'soda

 

[Glassman]

first of all, I'd look for oscillators inside the drive.. don't really know what to expect, but it you happen to find something related to 44.1kHz you're on a right track, otherwise don't waste your time..

 

[motherone]

The NEC Multispin 4 and 6Xi/e are really well built cd-rom drives that are usable as a transport. However, the e version is already in an external chassis w/power supply. The popular mods for these are to replace the switching PSU (+5 @ 1.5amp and +12v @ 1.5 amp) with a linear regulated one. There's also mods you can do on the TTL to S/PDIF converter.

You can find these on ebay for $10-40.