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Home Theater Speakers and your PC

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One of the callers from the 888-PIRILLO line is having trouble connecting his home theater system to his PC. He can hear sounds coming from it, but when he plays games and such, he’s not getting surround sound.

If all the cables are connected properly, and your sound card can handle it… you may need a different type of cable. Make sure that the speakers, sound card and cables you have are all capable of supporting Surround Sound. I asked what kind of cable he’s using. He’s using a standard mini-jack… which will not give him 5.1 Surround Sound. I let him know he’s going to have to have at least five cables. 5.1is the most common surround setup: pairs of front and rear speakers, plus a front center “dialog” speaker. Look for Dolby Digital or DTS in games and DVDs.

Perfecting your sound is a three-step process. To start you need to correctly configure your soundcard. All the big players provide some sort of Control Panel or configuration software that lets you adjust the card’s settings to suit your speaker system. At the very least it should let you pick the number of speakers you’re using or choose headphones. In many cases there are wizards to make the process easier.

Next you’ll need to set your application software, be it a DVD player or the latest game. For games the usual options are for A3D, EAX, DirectSound or alternative. Some DVD players now offer virtual Dolby or a full Dolby software decoder built-in – this provides you with a Dolby certified decoding system that will then work with any speaker system.

The final step is to check your speakers. The optimal positioning is to have the satellites at ear height and equally spread out. Any central speaker should be placed either above or below the monitor, while the subwoofer can technically be placed anywhere, though towards the front of the room is best.

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25 Comments

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source:Home Theater Speakers and your PC, Chris Pirillo Not exactly what I was looking for, nevertheless still a good read.

source:Home Theater Speakers and your PC

yeah that was what I was thinking 2!!!

Apple is going the right way with Mac Pro hardware.

Really helpful Chris!

Did you hear the shame when Chris responded with silence? rofl.

haha, Chris was right but at the end it sounded like he didn’t get it or he was upset

wow, some ppl just dont know how to listen..

I bought speakers from Radioshack for $20 and they are pretty good. I recommend them because they are {sort of} home theate-ish, lol and they are CHEAP,, :D

Dont know much about getting games to play with Home Theater, but the ATV-2.0 and iTunes 7.6 has a great feature to control your music with your home theater directly through iTunes. I’m currently connected wirelessly to my home theater via ATV, and works great!

Poor guy. Chris just doesn’t know how to explain it!

It has to be digital or 6 channel sound.

There are 3 main types of connections for a digital receiver, Digital Optical, Digital Coax (Orange RCA Jack) and Analog Stereo. Chris, you were correct with him using the wrong correction, he should use Optical if availabe (more common on newer motherboards. Most soundcards also what is called a S/PDIF digital connection which has many converter types including optical. This would be the preferred route for his problem. Computer sound cards using analog surround sound use 3 connectors. (green/orange/black mini jacks) Green does both front speakers in stereo, black powers the rear two speakers and orange does both the center channel and subwoofer. Also the reason that he may hear sound from all speakers however still in stereo is something called matrixing (likely Dolby Pro Logic I/II).

Sorry for grammar/spelling.

Jesse

That’s a hard topic to just explain over the phone.

oh god. advertising apple again.
um… chris, hate to tell you this. go and buy any motherboard or any sound card for PC and, they’ll have coax and toslink.
and, you didnt say, that outputting it via toslink doesnt decode the signal, thats why analog 3.5mm connectors are better often.
the A/V reciever is upmixing it to surround sound.
and chris! how he is connecting the 360 to the reciever is the same as how he is connecting the PC to the reciever!!!

Hi,
Always go for optical. Based on my experience, you could have far better quality than using the normal analog wires. But if it is possible, keep your optical wire as short as possible, buy the one that is just required. Long optical wire will contribute to the loss of data transmitted/received. Less than 2 meters is very recommended

i think the guy isnt getting 5.1 surround sound because he is using one of those adapters that one end connect to the red and white rca audio cables and the other end connects to only the green speaker cable and that speaker cable is only for the 2.1 speaker configuration.

this is one thing I don’t get. ONe sees all these numbers being passed around with sound systems today along with higher prices. Like 7.1, 6.1, 5.1, blah blah blah… but does anybody even bother with all those speakers?

I find having a woofer and 2 speakers dealing with high and mid range freqs good enough.

I like to know does anybody actually put all those speakers behind them and to the side and what not around them??? do they? I think not.

Had a similar problem a couple of days ago. Turns out that Intel Audio Studio has a special ‘Power’ button to enable Digital Signal Processing features including Stereo->5.1 upscaling. The button was so big and blue it never occured to me to check if it is clickable.

Obviously i’m too late…you need an optical onection or similar for a full surround connection. Another option is to use the 6CH inputs on your home theater system. And, if you have niether the cables nor the ports for either connection, your best bet if you want “fake” surround, use the 5CH stereo mode. I, myself, have a home theater system placed as my speakers and I need the optical cable for it!

(Best part: that guy is way older than me and I know that you need an optical cable for full surround.)

i beleave they where having trouble communicating i could tell the whole time that the caller didnt understand or knew that wasnt the problem but didnt say anything

either way an audio forum would be better

I was under the impression that most PC optical is not fully compatible w/ home stereo optical. Home stereos are expecting Dolby Digital or DTS encoded signals when doing 5.1, but PCs just use SPDIF. You can connect a PC to a home stereo via the optical link, but the best you will get is PCM stereo (two-channel).
There are only a few PC sound systems that actually output Dolby Digital or DTS on the optical link (NVidia NForce2 & Intel I think?). In most cases you must use the analog mini-connectors to get true 5.1 sound to your home stereo, and now you’ve lost the digital quality.
Creative sells an external converter that accepts the six analog channels from the PC and coverts it (with a small delay) into a DTS signal over optical so it can be connected to a home stereo.

do somebody knowsa how t connect my pc to my hometheather??? what cables do i need??

The guy on the other line is an idiot…

when you guy’s call in,make sure you know how to ask a tech question. so chris can understand it.lol.

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