I have a creative 5 speaker setup that I used on my pc just fine. I was told that if I plug in the black cable to the headphone jack that everything will work... well I'm getting fine sound out of half the speakers, and for some reason only the rear two... how can I fix this on my mac?
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Setting up surround sound?
- Thread starter tyoelin
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Umm whats the "black cable"? If it is a standard 1/8" male plug then it will only deliver stereo to the speakers, however depending on the speaker system you might be able to force a 5.1 or 5.0 "virtual" surround.tyoelin said:
What cable did you use with your PC? Also what is the model of the speaker system?
You can also try going into System Preferences > Audio and see what you can do as far as sound output, or go to Audio MIDI Setup and check your settings there.
Edit: also what mac are you trying to accomplish this with?
Let us know some more info if this doesn't work!
faintember said:
Heheh sorry
Creative Labs Speakers (Dont know the model - 4 speakers 1 sub)
Connected to the PC via one black audio cable and one green audio cable, I dont know what kind this is
The mac guy told me just to connect the black cable but I forgot to tell him that I have 4 speakers if that makes any difference
I found in the MIDI setup in Utilities, it has the option for surround and multiple speakers but when I try to select them in the speaker configuration theyre all grayed out except for Stereo
I'm trying to do this on a 17" powerbook
Please help if you can thanks!!
Its all gravy!tyoelin said:Heheh sorry
Creative Labs Speakers (Dont know the model - 4 speakers 1 sub)
Connected to the PC via one black audio cable and one green audio cable, I dont know what kind this is
The mac guy told me just to connect the black cable but I forgot to tell him that I have 4 speakers if that makes any difference
I found in the MIDI setup in Utilities, it has the option for surround and multiple speakers but when I try to select them in the speaker configuration theyre all grayed out except for Stereo
I'm trying to do this on a 17" powerbook
Please help if you can thanks!!
My guess is that with the PC you had two audio sources (the two audio cables), and one supplied audio to l/r front, the other to audio l/r rear and the sub operated off of a connection to one set of the speakers or a single speaker, and the sub just had a built-in low-pass filter to allow for the lower pitches to be reproduced.
The four speakers does make an difference. hehe
Ok, a few options. The cheap one first.
Buy a line splitter, plug that into your PB, then run the two audio cables to the speakers as you had it on your PC. The only issue is it will be "true" surround sound in the 5.1 sense, but it will immerse you in the sound field.
or......the cool/geeky solution (of course the not so cheap solution)
Get something like this that allows you to use your optical output in your 17" PB to connect to the speakers, and give you true surround sound.
or......depending on the speaker setup, an audio breakout box may work. This would allow a lot of options (8 outputs) but probably isn't the most logical choice for a non-musician/producer. There may be other products out there that are similar to this but are cheaper and just do 5.1, but i am not aware of them.
oh, btw, the reason the surround is grayed out is that nothing is currently using surround, such as there is no audio breakout box attached or there is no cable hooked into the optical output.
Keep us updated.
Another solution is to use the Sonica Theater which you can use to directly plug in both the black and green cables.
irmongoose
irmongoose
If you mean using the audio splitter, i should make something clear.tyoelin said:Thanks for the replies, I think I'll try doing that cheap way first
If you are watching Jurassic Park and the T-Rex is walking up from behind you, the audio will not come out of the rear speakers this way, all audio will come from all of the speakers all of the time. You also may notice that the audio volume is somewhat lower this way, as the analog signal is literally split.
faintember said:
I agree, ive got a 6.1 config using the line splitter and while it works great for music, watching movies can become odd with the senses interpreting sound from behind which is just suppose to come from the left/right speaker.
However by all means if this does not annoy you, try this setup. It good enough for me and my budget.