[vorius]

Wow I need help with this, I thought this would be easy but Im not sure what to do...


I currently have a Sound Blaster X-Fi xtreme sound card in my HTPC which only has 4 ports, the "digital" port seems to be a pseudo digital port because it is a mini jack plug and it can only handle 2 speakers if I am reading this diagram that it came with correctly...


So how would I connect my PC to my 5.1 speakers? The diagram shows using 3 wires from 3 separate ports of the cord to the receiver, but I'm not sure what those wires are, stereo wires?


Alterantively... I have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 laying around which I think has a SPDIF optical out port. Unfortantely i do not have the diagram from that sound card to confirm I canuse it for 5.1 speaker system


Also I cannot determine if my receiver would be able to accept that. I have a Sony sTR-DE595 receiver which has two optical ports in the back, one labelled "Video 2 In" the other "CD/SACD In". Something tells me thats not what I can use ?


It also has some orange/beige colored port labelled DVD In/Coaxial under a section labelled Digital. The port looks like an RCA port.


Other then that it has a big mess of red/white rca inputs.


I would like to use the most simple and best quality solution from sound card to this receiver but I'm so lost here, please someone give me some advice

 

[Concillian]

I think the X-fi normally doesn't have a digital out on the back of the card. You have to either get the front panel box or figure out which of the pins on the front panel connector are the SPDIF out pins and rig up an RCA port there so you can use the coax to your receiver.


Mostly you're just passing digital signals to your receiver to decode, so you don't need anything fancy, many motherboards have optical / coax digital outs built in, otherwise the Chaintech AV710 is the general recommendation for good quality digital out to a receiver.

 

[olyar15]

I am pretty sure that the digital out on the X-fi will work, but you need to use a 3.5mm to coaxial cable. I don't recall if you need a stereo or mono 3.5mm plug. It will plug into the coaxial input on your receiver (the orange coloured plug). Also, make sure you disable DD/DTS decoding in the Soundblaster control panel (you want the sound card to pass through these signals, not attempt to decode them).


And just so you know, you will only get 5.1 audio when playing DD or DTS encoded audio. The digital output will not pass multichannel sound from games, or from multichannel WMA audio. For those, you will only get PCM stereo.

 

[manshack_one]

Can someone post a link to what kind of cable to get? I''ve got an audigy 2 and can't get anything other than stereo out of it to the receiver. The receiver is a 5.1 with coaxial input for the cd player.

 

[vorius]

Ok this is weird, I am going for the analog setup and the receiver has one group of red/yellow audio inputs called multichannel in which looks like the only part of the receiver that accepts more than 1 or 2 speakers. It has one pair labelled Front another pair labelled Surround and then two black connectors which look similar to rca plugs one labelled Center other Subwoofer. The diagram i got with my sound card is expecting my to send 3 stereo jack plugs from the card to stereo jacks on the receiver, which of course dont exist. The best I can do is split the stereo jack into two rca plugs but then the questions is where do I connect them on this receiver, if I can at all?


Im so confused


This is the manual to my receiver: http://www.docs.sony.com/release/STRDE595.pdf