5.1 Sound system for Imac possible without optical output?

[leomon]

Hi guys,

im new here, and my friend bought an imac, its really sweet.

I am really sitting on the edge of buying it. I am an avid PC user, and have been all my life.

However i am a music fanatic. After reading this forum, my speakers arent really that new, they are the old Z-5300's but they are still great in terms of sound.


They dont have optical output, just the standard 3 x 3.5mm connections.
Left center and right.

what is the cheapest way to hookup these speakers to the imac, while still having 5.1 sound ie. for watching movies

 

[sycho]

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/firewave/

 

[chmarch]

An external sound card is not necessarily the best answer. This permanently uses up the FireWire port on your Mac. I would recommend the Creative Decoder DDTS-100. Sadly, Creative no longer sells this item, but I'm sure you can find one on eBay

The Creative Decoder allows for 7 inputs - 3 optical, 3 stereo, and 1 coax. Its up-mixing quality is superb, and I have enjoyed it very much so for the past year.

Christopher

 

[Techguy172]

My brother has this attatchment that goes on the end and turns the three speaker ports into just a single 3.5mm port it came with his dell 5.1 speakers. so maybe you could get one of these it works really good.

 

[netherfred]

Try this one!

I have it and it works well in stereo, haven't tried 5.1 though. But it's cheap, about $25!

http://www.hercules.com/showpage.php?swcty=UK&p=108&b=0&f=0

 

[yg17]

I don't know about this but my brother has this attatchment that goes on the end and turns the three into just a single 3.5mm port it came with his dell 5.1 speakers.

That's not 5.1 That's at best 2.0 blasted out of 5 speakers and the sub. Which means 5.1 DVDs and games and such won't sound nearly as good because it's not 5 separate channels.

 

[leomon]

so the only way to work around this is buy an external video card like that fire wire thing?


That sucks. Why would apple put such a nice monitor perfect for video and movies and stick ONLY a optical port in it. So many people out there have the 3x3.5mm speaker inputs.

Now i gotta spend like 100$ just to enjoy 5.1 sound?
err

music is important to me. I need that 5.1 thx speakers workin.
I live in Canada to so i can only get this used, ebay or amazon with the shipping and duties...

 

[l33r0y]

The iMac line out doubles as a digital optical 5.1 bitstream or standard analog stereo.

Your speakers are designed to take multichannel analog which is a cheap alternative for surround sound, designed to be used with hardware that outputs in analog - such as typical gaming surround sound cards.

Apple doesn't cut corners as a rule, so if you want PROPER digital surround sound, you will need to invest in the appropriate hardware.

I suggest you replace your speakers with another 5.1 set that accepts a digital optical input. The alternative would be to buy a second hand 5.1 receiver with optical input and the appropriate connections to be able to connect it to the 5300 speaker ports.

 

[fredsherbet]

games won't put out in dolby digital surround, so to get surround sound in games, you HAVE to use seperate analogue channels

 

[leomon]

Aarghhh
i get i have no choice to tack on another 100$ for a imac purchase if i want quality sound.

1600$ i could get a quad core 2.4 with a 8800GTX card sigh~..

 

[jf8]

I use a Creative DDTS-100 with the Logitech Z-5300e speakers. It works pretty well.

I bought a DDTS-100 from eBay in 2005 and it failed a few days later. It was still under warranty, so I got it replaced by Creative and it's worked fine since.

And what exactly is the point of using 5.1 for music? Nearly every music source is 2 channels, with the exceptions being DTS CDs and DVD Audio.