How to Connect 5.1 Speakers to Your PC
Understanding Your Speaker System
Contents
Together with your system should come at least three set of cables for connecting your speaker system to your PC. These cables can be seen in Figure 5 and they are colored to help on the installation: green, blue (or black) and orange (or yellow or pink).
Figure 5: Cables that came with our system.
With our system came also three female stereo mini jack to stereo RCA converters, which you can see in Figure 6. These adapters must be used if you want to connect your speaker system to your standard DVD player, since DVD players use RCA connectors, not mini jacks. Since we are connecting our speaker to our PC and not to our DVD player, let’s keep them away.
Figure 6: Adaptors if you want to connect the speaker system to your home DVD player.
You should connect the cables matching the colors on the jacks located on the volume control unit. This is a no-brainer. Anyway, if you feel safer by knowing which cable is which, we give the meaning of each color below.
Figure 7: Connecting the cables to the volume control unit.
- Front Input: Green.
- Rear Input: Blue or black.
- Center/Subwoofer: Orange, yellow or pink.
After connecting these cables, you should also connect all other cables, like power, subwoofer and speakers. This is very easy to do. Just pay attention to the subwoofer connection, because you should follow the polarity that is written on the connectors. At the end of this process all connectors on the volume control unit should have a cable connected.
