I am trying to help my brother hook up his new PC to his TV system. He has a Bose receiver with many jack options. The PC appears to have a Digital Audio out Jack with an RCA style jack. I tried a standard RCA cable out of this jack to the Bose Receiver’s Digital Audio In for Cab-Sat (Cable - Satellite), we got no sound out. Does Digital Audio require a special cable? I have never dealt with Digital audio before.
The Computer is an HP with Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit)
loaded. He did verify he gets sound out via the standard basic green audio micro-jack hooked up to a basic PC speaker.
Additional question, he is currently hooked up to his DLP TV with a DVI to HDMI cable, I am sending him home with a spare DVI to DVI cable I have as his TV won’t split screen with the HDMI signal from the PC, but apparently will with DVI. Does he lose any picture quality versus a HDMI to HDMI cable. This is another option and I might set him up with both DVI and HDMI if the HDMI is a better signal for games and video.
I have the pertinent PC Specs …
– 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT, DVI-I, TV-out, HDMI
– ATSC-NTSC TV tuner with PVR, FM tuner, remote
– Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
Jim (Reposted here as a new thread as per Gfactor suggestion)
I had to deal with this recently. Apparently, it’s a digital coax audio connection used for digital surround sound. My TV sound output (since I had the TV signal inputted via HDMI) had the standard red/white left/right RCA audio jacks and the digital audio jack for surround sound. I read on some sites that while you can use standard RCA cables, they sell specific higher-quality cables for coaxial audio such as that.
My home entertainment system doesn’t have an input for coaxial cable so I ended up bypassing the TV’s audio altogether with a single, optical S/PDIF connector. Much easier.
Also, if I recall, I believe a HDMI cable is basically a DVI cable that also carries audio (and DRM if the DVI doesn’t utilize DRM).
Technically you should have a 75 ohm impedance coaxial cable for this. The yellow on your basic yellow/red/white RCA AV cord is theoretically of this type, and if all three cords are the same diameter the red and white probably are 75 ohm too. In practice the red or white will probably work anyways even if they’re not exactly to spec. Since this is a digital signal, if they work at all they are working as well as the any cable will. Don’t waste money on some Monster digital audio coax if your el cheapo out-of-the-Sony-box yellow/red/white RCA cord works.
I strongly suspect that the reason you’re getting no sound at all is that you have to assign the specific digital coax jack on the Bose receiver to the input source in question. There’ll be some default setting (such as optical 1 assigned to DVD source, optical 2 to DVR, coax 1 to TVS, whatever). You can generally change which digital audio input is assigned to which source in the receiver in the menu somewhere. Check your manuals.
