Have you ever hooked surround sound up to your PC?

[motorsteak 96 / 2,112]

So I was doing some pc maintenance and hunting random blue screens and game crashes the other day and I had my pc on my desk so I could easily work on it. I was busy tearing into it, elbow deep in a horse style and I looked down and noticed the various audio jacks on the rear I/O pannel.

 

So I looked them up because they're not labeled very well on the machine I was working on and found this

 

 

This got me thinking about if anyone actually uses/used this for a surround sound setup. You can apparently get full 7.1 surround sound with this jack layout too.

 

Incase you don't know, this is the breakdown of the jacks and their uses

Lime is your front L and R and also for if you're just running a stereo speaker or headphone setup

Grey is your side L and R

Black is your rear L and R

Orange is the center speaker (usually right under the TV/monitor) and your subwooofer

blue and pink aren't used for the 7.1 setup but they are used if you have a mic or other input and they are both stereo inputs as well

 

I know in 2021 there are much easier and practical cabling solutions. Just about every pc has HDMI (or Displayport which can be converted to HDMI) to plug into a surround sound receiver which has its own amps and sound quality gear. There's also toslink which is that fiber optic audio port and digital audio jacks which are also other options that most modern gear uses.

 

My question for you guys is have you ever seen this used or have you only seen the other, more modern options used?

[AIexis 182 / 6,549]

I think I used it once or twice on my old computer when I was testing something, my new one doesn't even have colour coding or the side speaker port (and yes I know the front headphone jack or the mic jack can be repurposed as the grey jack for 7.1).

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,945]

Gosh I worked in an electronics store and I've never seen anyone use that.

 

From an electrical engineering perspective you might be able to get all of the channels, but analog signals are less resilient and so I would think you would notice the sound quality degrading.  Would be fun comparison, though, and maybe the ears wont notice anything.

[AIexis 182 / 6,549]

8 hours ago, Joshy said:

From an electrical engineering perspective you might be able to get all of the channels, but analog signals are less resilient and so I would think you would notice the sound quality degrading.

I can say from experiments as long as you have decent motherboard and a decent power supply the sound quality won't degrade, I mean realtek literally has things for managing surround from those jacks as well.