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What are the names of all the CD audio connectors?

Malvineous

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 18, 2010
Messages
119
Location
Brisbane, Australia
Hi all,

I'm looking for a particular connector to make a CD audio cable for one of my retro PCs, but I realised that I don't actually know what the connectors are all called.

There's a photo of one type of "universal" cable here: http://cable-trader.co.uk/items/universal-cd-rom-audio-cable-05-mtrs

From that, I know:

  • The four pin black connector (the "modern" one) is a Molex 70107, and was listed in the MPC standard so I think it is safe to call it an "MPC connector" as a common name.
  • The small three and four pin white connectors are compatible (the three pin one will fit in a four-pin socket and work) but I don't know what this connector is called. It's similar to a JST one but smaller. I'm not sure which brands of drive they were popular with, so I'm not sure whether you could come up with a common name based on the drive manufacturer (e.g. "Matsushita connector").
  • The large white four-pin connector is very similar to a CPU fan connector, but again I don't know the exact name or which drives they were popular with (to give it a "common name").

Can anyone shed any light on what these connectors are, and what common names one might use to refer to them?
 
Before the MPC standard there was no standard for analog audio connectors, so most manufacturers just used "random" connectors from parts they could get cheap or have used before. For example Panasonic made different connectors than Toshiba and so on. Same for sound cards. Not sure if it makes sense to label them after the manufacturer, although i have seen that quite often, like "Panasonic CD-ROM audio cable". That might be overlapping at some point, i think Panasonic and NEC for example used (at least at one point) the same cable. To make stuff worse some manufacturers even varied these cables, so for some of their early CD-ROMs you'd need a different cable than for the later models.

What is (imho) even worse were the proprietary drive controllers, so pre-IDE drives often had a proprietary interface, like SOny, Panasonic and Mistumi drives were not compatible from neither the cable nor the controller.
 
That's very true. I'm trying to build a database of cards and drives and list what type of connector they use. So it doesn't matter that they are all different, what's important is to come up with some names to identify the connectors. If there are two connectors with different wiring then the name should reflect that. I just don't know how many variations there are out there!

The proprietary drive controllers actually aren't that bad. There's (to my knowledge) one Panasonic type, one Sony, one Mitsumi and that's it (apart from IDE and SCSI of course.) At least that only makes three variations to worry about. I fear CD audio cables are much more varied!
 
I'd try to generate meaningful names by the physical appearance of the connector. Maybe something like "4 pin 2.54mm pitch" and "4 pin 2mm pitch" or so? It would probably beat generating names like "Panasonic to SB" or "Mitsumi to Pro Audio Spectrum". I don't like calling a cable a "Panasonic cable" when it's also used by an NEC drive and such, i think that just creates more confusion.

For the controlers i think there were more even though they might be obscure. I remember Philips had one very eary drive with that LMSI interface - luckily there were a handful of Sound Blaster cards that had the LMSI interface.

There even terrible inventions like the external Hitachi CDR-1900s which looked like a parallel port drive from the connector when in fact it needed a proprietary interface cards as well. I think LG also had special interfaces.
 
Oh interesting, I've never seen anything about those more obscure interfaces.

I agree that using brand names is not so great. I was thinking more of the name of each connector itself, like "JST 4-pin LGGR" and "JST 3-pin LGR" except it turns out that it's not a JST connector after all, so I'm wondering whether anyone else knows what it's called.

Maybe I need to ask in an electrical engineering forum!
 
These may give you some ideas...

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Oh nice, that's *exactly* what I was looking for! Where did you find those? Only one missing is the Panasonic/Matsushita/MKE one (which of course in typical fashion is the one that started this quest!)
 
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