How To Connect Your PC to Your Home Stereo or Home Theater
Optical Digital Connection
Contents
If both your PC and your home theater receiver have this connection, that’s the one you should use, because it provides the best quality. In other to connect your PC to your receiver using this connection, you will need a fiber optic cable, which comes with your receiver.
On the receiver, plug one end of the cable to the input labeled “Digital Optical In”, “Digital DVD In” or similar (on our receiver this input was labeled “Optical Video 2 In”). Before inserting the plug, pay attention if the receiver input is closed or not. If it uses a squared black peg, you should remove it before trying to insert the plug.
Then connect the other end of the cable on your PC, on the black squared plug. But before inserting the plug, remove the black squared peg that protects the connector, like we show in Figure 14.
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 (on our receiver we had to change its selector to “Video 2” since our cable was connected on an input labeled “Optical Video 2 In”).
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
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.
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.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, you have found this article useful and you can now connect your subwoofer to your PC more easily.