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

Coaxial Digital Connection

All home theater receivers have this connector. You should use it if both your computer and receiver have it and if your PC and/or your receiver don’t have optical digital connection.

For this connection you will need a simple RCA-RCA mono cable, like the one shown in Figure 9. Usually home theater receivers come with a spare cable for this kind of connection, where the plugs are orange. The color isn’t important; you can use a cable with red, white, black, yellow, pink or whatever color plug.

**Figure 9:** Mono RCA-RCA cable needed to connect your PC to your home theater receiver using coaxial digital connection.

On the receiver, plug one end of the cable to the input labeled “Digital Coaxial In”, “Digital DVD In” or similar.

**Figure 10:** Connecting the cable on our receiver.

Then connect the other end of the cable on you PC, on the plug we described on the first page of this tutorial.

connecting home theater cable to PC — **Figure 11:** Connecting the cable on our PC.

Now everything is connected and should work just fine. You need to change the input selector on your receiver to “DVD In”, “Digital DVD In” or similar.

Coaxial Digital Connection

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