That's taking the joke.. you should do your test again...

That's not possible!! Analog playing is actually the CDROM/DVDROM drive playing the track without passing audio samples to PC. The PC software player tells the drive what track to play and the drive plays it on it's own accord without any further PC intervention - no more CPU power being used - except for display of remaining/current playing track time. How did you do your test?? You got some strange drive or system??

I tell you why this is impossible... you can do this test yourself, if you have a drive which has play audio button on the front panel then remove the IDE or SCSI cable and go into your PC BIOS or boot into DOS. Now put in an audio CD and press the play button. Behold the CD starts playing music! This is how analog play mode works - independant of PC - it consumes 0% CPU - you can't top that with any other playing mode!!

With digital mode the PC software player keeps needing to tell the drive to pass audio samples for all sectors of the track (streaming) through the IDE or SCSI cable and also telling the sound card to play the samples - using CPU power.