Can you connect surround sound to PC?

If you want to connect a surround sound set of speakers, you'll need a PC whose audio board supports surround sound. You will most likely find PC motherboards with either RCA surround sound ports or an optical audio output port. As you have already seen in this article, there are multiple ways to connect a home theater to your PC, and these two are the most common.

How can I connect my PC to my AV receiver through HDMI?

Once you have two HDMI cords leading out of your computer, simply hook one of them up to an HDMI input, and the other to an input on your AV receiver. Tune your TV to the input your PC is connected to, and do the same with your receiver. If you don't have an HDMI connection port on one of the devices, you can simply look online for an adapter for whatever port you have to HDMI. However, do keep in mind that if you're going to connect, for example, a VGA adapter to an HDMI adapter, you won't have any sound. Also, these adapters can get expensive thanks to the fact that they need to convert an analog signal to a digital one.

Does USB support surround sound?

Yes, USB ports can support surround sound, even surround sound of even 7.1 settings. USB is powerful and can handle tons of data, and with the advancements found in USB 3.0, we might probably even see 12.1 surround sound coming with fewer ports that you need to care about. It will be interesting to see what surround sound devices will make an appearance in the future.

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

Identifying Your Receiver Inputs

On your receiver (“amplifier”, home stereo, home theater) you should look for inputs labeled “digital”. The receiver shown in Figure 2 has both coaxial and optical digital audio inputs.

back of home theater receiver outputs — **Figure 2**: Digital audio inputs on a home theater receiver.

If you cannot find them, that means you receiver doesn’t have digital audio input, thus you will need to use its analog input, which is labeled “Aux”. Actually you can use any input except the one labeled as “Phono”, so if you receiver doesn’t have an input labeled “Aux” you can use any other input like “Tape In”, “DVD In”, “CD In”, “MD In”, etc. If you cannot find any input at all, this means that your stereo doesn’t have any kind of input at all and you won’t be able to connect your PC to it.

On our receiver in Figure 3 we could use any one of the inputs labeled “CD In”, “MD/Tape In”, “DVD Audio In” and “Video 2 Audio In” (and also “Video 1 Audio In”, but this one was already being used by our VCR).

**Figure 3:** Inputs on a home theater receiver.

On our receiver in Figure 4 we could use the input labeled as “Aux” as well as “Tape 1 In”, “Tape 2 In” and “Ext Pros In”.

inputs on a regular sound receiver — **Figure 4:** Inputs on a regular receiver.

Now that you know what kind of connection both your PC and your home stereo or home theater have, you can go ahead and connect them. We will show you how to do this in the next pages.

Identifying Your Receiver Inputs

Contents

For Performance

Everything you need to know