so he decided to build a compact CD player that could discreetly connect up to his fancy Klipsch speaker. The optical drive itself was the easy part, as [Chad] already had a laptop-style drive in ...

Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.