Surround Sound on MCE

[Mike]

Can anyone share how they have connected their MCE or HTPC to their receiver for surround sound? I initially set it up with 1/8" mini to red/white RCA and then realized recently that even though I had a DTS capable decoder, I need to use something else to get it to the reciever.

I have an Audigy 2 ZS card on the shelf I was gonna use, but I believe I need a special cable.

All I found so far was this:

http://www.creative.com/products/product.a...uct=14309&nav=0

Any reccomendations?

 

[electron]

I have an optical (SPDIF) connection between my MCE box and receiver, since my receiver can decode Dolby and DTS without any problems. Keep in mind that when you have this setup, that you don't do any decoding on your PC.

 

[Mike]

Hmm, I don't have optical out on that PC, but perhaps I should swap that with a better setup from my other machine so it does have optical (I think the other machine has it, but I'm not using it).

Using the reciever for the decoder makes sense, although I did buy the nVidia decoder that does DTS as well.

I was looking at this earlier:

http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/RCA-mini-spdif.html

and was trying to figure out if the higher quality version was required for a 6' setup.

 

[electron]

I almost bought the more expensive version of the Nvidia DVD Decoder as well, since I wanted DTS support too, but then I realized that my PC isn't doing any of the decoding, so I just went with the cheapest package. I am using the onboard spdif out port (Abit motherboard), but I guess you could find a cheap soundcard (maybe an OEM SB Live or something) if you don't want to move your OS.