No audio from CD player

I have a computer that will play audio that is downloaded from the internet, but will not play audio from cd rom. The cable from the sound card is plugged into the cd rom. The cd rom will read the audio and show the information on the cd, but will not play audio. This is the same whether you use WMP or CD player program. I have installed the most recent soundmax audio drivers for the soundcard. Volume properties show nothing to be muted and all of the volume is at a high enough level to hear. Here is the computer information:

Compaq Presario 5000 series
Soundmax onboard sound card
AMD 700mhz
256mb RAM
generic cd-rom

Thanks in advance for your help!

Double check the audio cable and check advanced properties.

Check that the CD audio cable is plugged into the right plug on the soundcard, some sound cards have CD, AUX, and TAD connectors, another test would be to plug the speakers into the jack on the CDROM, and for that matter, some CDROM volume control what the volume that goes to the Sound card.

If that fails, I think WMP has a Digital Audio mode that plays the audio digitally(bypassing the audio cable I think) rather than Analog, check in WMP under options>Devices>CD-Drive Properties(this is for WMP 8, hopefully WMP 7 might be similar)