From I understand, you need an optical cable to transfer positional sound from the source (In this case, an xbox) to the speakers…
Now, could I hook the speakers up to my sound card (Soon an Audigy 2 + 5.25" drive bay), run an optical cable from the xbox to the sound card, and have 3d sound when I play my games?
And, until I do that… if I just hook up the speakers to the console, will all the speakers be used? Probably not the center, but will the subwoofer?
The Audigy 2 I believe has an audio in and 5.1 decoding, so there shouldn’t be a problem. The way it usually works is the game or DVD has 5.1 (or DTS or THX or whatever) encoding, then you have a reader to send it out through digital audio (coaxial or optical) and to the decoder (a receiver or sound card) which then interprets how to send it to the 5 to 8 speakers. So it shouldn’t be a problem – the sound card and receiver are equivalent.
I don’t have an Xbox or a PS2, but a friend brought one over and we hooked it into my surround sound system (typical A/V receiver set up thingy). The games came in in digital audio, but all of them were interpreted as Dolby ProLogic II, which is not as good as 5.1 (I believe it has rear speaker emulation). Are there Xbox and PS2 games which are 5.1 encoded?
For XBox to play in true Dolby 5.1 you need the optical cable hookup (a special adapter bought specially for this purpose…watch out for the connector on the optical cable too…different for the XBox side of things as I learned the hard way).
For the game to play in 5.1 the game has to support 5.1. If you look at the back of the box the XBox game came in it usually indicates if this is supported (although not always…there seem to be a few different labelling convenvtions XBox games have gone through…some give more specific info than others).
I son’t know about PS2.
So I couldn’t just use a regular optical cable? Would you happen to know where I could get one that would suit this purpose?
It doesn’t need to be an optical cable, it just needs to carry a digital signal, with the receiving end having the proper decoder. Besides optical, I’ve seen standard audio cables with miniplug or RCA connectors carry the same signal. My DVD player has an digital optical output, and a digital “coax” out, and my amplifer has cooresponding inputs. I’ve tried both (using a standard RCA audio cable between the coax connections), and I personally can’t tell any difference in sound quality between them. A long cable run would be better done in optical, however, which would tend to reduce or eliminate any dropout.
And unless your sound card has five separate speaker outputs, running the xbox through the sound card won’t fix anything. You need to rin the output to something that has a decoder AND outputs for each speaker.
Well, the sound card has support for 5.1 surround sound, ie, One input for the front left/right, one for the rear left/right, and one for the center, I believe…
Anywho, I think this’ll work out… so… thanks guys
True enough…I actually use both on my DVD player simultaneously as certain types of DVD audio only give their full effect via coax (for security reasons to make it harder to make perfect copies).
However, for the XBox the only way to go is via optical. At least it is the only way I found to get 5.1 from it. I think the cables can be had at Best Buy.