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

Analog Connection

If your PC doesn’t have digital outputs or your receiver doesn’t have them, you will need to use the regular analog connection. You will need the cable shown in Figure 5, which at one end has two male RCA connectors and at the other hand a stereo P2 male plug (stereo mini jack). If on the store you go to buy it the clerk doesn’t understand what you want, just say that you want a cable to connect your Discman to your home stereo. It is the same cable.

RCA cables lying on a table — **Figure 5:** Cable needed to connect your PC to your home stereo using analog connection.

On the receiver, plug the red (or yellow) male RCA connector from the cable to the plug labeled “R” or “Right” on the receiver, and the white (or black) male RCA connector from the cable to the plug labeled “L” or “Left” on the receiver, on the input we described last page (“Aux”, “Tape In”, “CD In”, etc). See Figures 6 and 7.

cables connected to home theater receiver — **Figure 6:** Cable connected to our home theater receiver (here we used the “MD/Tape In” input).

**Figure 7:** Cable connected to a standard receiver (here we used the “Aux” input).

Now just insert the other end of the cable to the green connector located on your PC.

back of PC connected to home theater receiver — **Figure 8:** Connecting our PC to our receiver.

Now everything is connected and should work just fine. You need to change the input selector on your receiver to the correspondent input you used. I.e. if you connected your PC to the “Aux” input, you choose select “Aux” on your receiver.

Analog Connection

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