How To Connect Your PC to Your Home Stereo or Home Theater

[Hardware Secrets Team]

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Title: How To Connect Your PC to Your Home Stereo or Home Theater
URL: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/259

Here is a snippet:
"How about connecting your PC to your home stereo or even to your home theater in order to get a better audio for your games, videos and audio files? In this tutorial we will show you how to make this ..."

Comments on this article are welcome.

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Hardware Secrets Team
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com

[francesco38]

Just a side comment on this article... The sound that comes from the PC is (most of the time) a digital signal (CD, DVD, mp3, you name it). The PC/sound card and the Home Theater share the task to acquire, decode, post process (spatialize, enhance, improve, mix, you name it), convert to analog and amplify the sound so that at the end an analog signal is sent to the Hi-Fi non-amplified speakers.
If you're after the best quality, you need to make sure each component is use at its best.
If you want to listen to a CD, for example, on a PC with a cheap sound chipset on the motherboard, on top notch Home Theater amplifier, it definitely makes sense to use the PC at its minimum - just to acquire the sound from the CD with the sound card, and pass it along to the HT receiver through the SPDIF digital out as a digital unprocessed signal - as you recommend in the article by telling people to rely on SPDIF when available.
Now if you have a good sound card (as in Creative X-Fi, Auzentech X-Meridian....) and a so-so HT amplifier it is better to use the sound card to decode, post process, and convert to analog. Direct analog input is then to be used on the HT amplifier - so that this component only amplify the "good" analog signal produced by the sound card.
Having myself an X-Meridian as a sound card (a good one then...), and a Yamaha V450 amplifier (so-so), I can tell you that the analog connection between PC/HT produce a much better sound than relying on optical SPDIF and using the DAC of the Yamaha...

So while I agree the SPDIF connection should be the one to use for people with low end PC sound card I differ for hi end stuff...

-Francois

[vdupuy]

Great article. Great comment Francois.

Question though. I have a cheap PC, with a cheap on board sound, and a good amp. How should I connect them? My PC has no optical/coax out, and my amp has all the inputs. Can I set the regular line out connector to transmit digital signal and connect the other end to the coax in?

Let me know, thanks!

Vincent