Hi guys,
I have an m-audio audiophile 24/96 pci card that has a digital input and I connected the output from my cdj-200 pioneer cd player to the digital input of the card.
The problem is that the output is a bit too high and the signal gets clipped at the edges.
There is no way to control the volume of inline signal AFAIK, although i am not an expert.
I appreciate any suggestions.
cheers,
geo

I presume you are connecting to a S/PDIF output on the CD player. There is no "audio signal" and no "volume" coming over the line, only information with numeric values for each sample. Each sample value is encoded in a 16 bit integer. This cannot contain values larger than 0dBfs, so it cannot have audio values that are too high.

The electrical signal itself has a voltage. I think the basic specification for S/PDIF is 0.5V peak to peak, but the Audiophile claims to be able to handle inputs up to 5V. This would seem to make it extremely hard to overdrive the card's inputs. It may be possible to adjust the output of the S/PDIF transmitter in the CD player, but if so I'm sure it is an extremely infrequent operation. It would no doubt require the equipment normally found in a digital electronics shop.

All of which is to say that your diagnosis seems unlikely. What do you mean when you say "the signal gets clipped at the edges"? What do you find in the recorded audio that does not seem right? Are you just doing this as an experiment or do you not have a CD drive on your computer? If the goal is to get the audio data onto your hard drive, DAE from a computer CD drive is much the better method.

I wanted to copy an audio cd to pc. the problem was with only one cd. the rest were ok, although it doesn't make sense, because as you say the output from the cd player was digital.
i can't use DAE because the cd was copy protected.

If it really is just "a bit too high" compared to your other CDs, rather than so bad as to be unlistenable, it could just be a poorly mastered CD. I posted this LINK a few days ago which gives such an example.

The analogue input on the Audiophile is very good. Try plugging the analogue output of the CD player into the analogue input of the soundcard and record. Here there could be a real difficulty of signal level, but otherwise you are very unlikly to hear any significant difference between your recording and the original.

There is a good chance there will be no problem, but if the signal level is too high and you are overloading the soundcard's inputs, you will need some attenuation between the CD player's output and the soundcard's input, such as a mixer or an audio preamp. While either of these will add 'something' to the CD's output, it will be very minor indeed if you use decent equipment.