What are the standard pin mappings for sound cards?

Question

I've got a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (Part # SB0350) that I'm installing as part of a computer that I'm building. There's a nifty headphone and speaker jack pair mounted on the case which I would like to connect, and I'm not sure if it's possible.

Have: 4 pins to connect: Mic-In, L-Out, R-Out, Ground. Pretty intuitive. The following outputs on the sound card: TAD, CD_IN, AUX_IN, CD_SPDIF, and an unlabled white 10-pin connector.

Does anyone know the pin values of TAD, CD_IN, ..., or the magical white connector? Or, perhaps, access to the manual of this card?

Answer 1

You have:

• TAD = Telephone Answering Device (pretty sure)
• AUX_IN = analog aux input
• CD_IN = analog audio input from your CD-ROM drive (oh so ancient)
• CD_SPDIF = digital, but still ancient

So none of those are really what you're looking for. It's possible that they don't actually offer connections for front-mounted headphones and microphone, or it's possible that the magical white connector is what you want.

Answer 2

If all else fails, you could just grab (quite literally) the "legs" of the jacks on the card.

Answer 3

I Found the manual linked on Amazon. The pin descriptions are on there, and Brad had them right. It doesn't look like it has a front panel audio connector, but I didn't look for very long.

Answer 4

That 4-pin connector is for connecting your CDROM drive directly to the soundcard. In the olden days, the CDROM drive itself would decode the audio and pass it directly to the soundcard, without going through your CPU, in order to optimize playing audio CDs. Nowadays this doesn't really happen, all computers are more than fast enough to play the audio CD directly.