 I have the laptop, with approximate sound. The usually audio outlay is the 3.5mm jack. My laptop supports HD audio, though I’m wondering how or what do we need to offshoot up an digital visual wire to my laptop. Can we find the wire which goes from visual to 3.5mm? Or do we only have to buy an audio label for my demonstrate slot? |
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Well, you could try finding a cable that goes from 3.5mm to digital optical. While you’re there, pick me up one of those pipes that takes in water at one end and flows out as oil on the other.
But no, what your laptop probably means by surround sound is emulated surround sound. Meaning, the speakers output as close to surround sound as is possible with only two physical speakers. We can build it, we have the technology! It just uses fancy audio science tricks to sound like surround sound when it isn’t, and doesn’t sound anything like real surround sound.
Ok, so technically, you could hook up your laptop to a surround sound system receiver (via 3.5mm-to-2x RCA jacks) and set the receiver on ProLogic mode. Which again is technically emulated surround sound, but a lot better since it’s actually being emulated onto a set of surround speakers. But is not true surround sound, because as the 2 RCA plugs indicate, this method of audio connection is only capable of left and right channels (ie. stereo).
Yes, you could probably buy an express slot audio card with optical output (assuming they exist) but there’s a couple problems here.
Number 1, this card would be an audio device itself. Meaning it wouldn’t utilise your laptop’s existing audio processing, but replace it, and would work just as well on any laptop regardless of what audio device it has (if any).
Number 2, the problem which people don’t seem to recognise, is that most of the audio generated on your PC isn’t surround sound. It’s not like you can just bung a surround sound system onto a laptop and it’s magically all surround sound. Well, ok, you can if you use Dolby Pro Logic, or your receiver’s equivalent of speaker matrix mode (where it just does normal stereo sound, but sends it to front and back speakers, sending anything on both channels to the middle speaker(s) and any bass to the woofer). But it’s still not true surround sound.
To get actual Dolby Digital/Dolby DTS real surround sound, your laptop needs to be outputting it – this will come from any DVDs or BluRay movies – assuming the media player you use supports digital surround output – or from a game which has surround support (many do). Also there are a bunch of audio file formats which support surround channels of audio – MP3 doesn’t, meaning most of your music collection will be stereo only (or you’ll have to resort to emulating surround). Note also that things like Winamp plugins which purport to output audio to surround sound just emulate surround in the same way your receiver can.
And of course, you’ll also need to be using a connection that actually supports digital surround sound, which at this stage is pretty much only S/PDIF fibre optic cable (TOSLINK), or S/PDIF over co-axial cable (same stuff used for composite or component video, RCA connector and everything). It’s possible your laptop has the latter, if it does it probably comes out via a 7-pin S-Video plug. Ok technically HDMI could also do it, but I don’t of any laptops that output digital surround audio via a HDMI jack, and even if they exist you probably don’t have one since they’d be reserved for high-end laptops.