View Full Version : digital pc audio to coaxial digital cable
bl5uami
11-22-2002, 12:27 PM
I finally got my pc to work with my hdtv looks awsome but i'm having problem with the audio. I cannot find a digital cable that will convert my audigy sound card digital
output (looks like a small headphone jack) to a digital coaxial cable to input into hy av reciever. Anybody solved this problem?
thanks
zarlor
11-22-2002, 01:36 PM
Is it a headphone jack or a digital optical jack (usually will have a little red light on the inside of you look close). If the former, you chould be able to check with Creative (http://www.creative.com I think is the site) to see exactly what kind of cable you need for that (not certain if you only need a mono or stereo headphone jack with standard RCA on the other end). But it's a cheap cable that should be easy and cheap to obtain. And don't worry about going cheap with a digital audio cable, as a coathanger will work just fine for a digital signal! (I know a guy who did it, with zero errors going across it.) You may also need to use the program that came with the card (I think it is the speaker or mixer program, at least it is for the SB Live! cards) and make sure you have it set for digital output. On the Live! cards if you don't set it to digital output it will treat that jack like a standard stereo headphone jack, if I remember correctly, so the same may be true for the Audigy cards.
If the latter, then there MIGHT be a transcoder box that will convert the optical signal to coax, but I'm not positive.Fot that you would need a TOSLINK (fiber optic) cable going from the card to the transcoder and just any old RCA jack coax to fo from the transcoder to the receiver.
bl5uami
11-22-2002, 06:37 PM
its definately the digital output. haven't tried the coathanger but if i can't find this cable i wouldn't rule it out. i think the audigy is a soundblaster card. thanks
pederb
11-24-2002, 10:37 AM
What you need is a miniplug to RCA. Any good hi end store that sells good cables should be able to sell you one or have one made. Just make sure it's a 75 ohm cable. Please stay away from coathangers that must be a joke. :rolleyes:
zarlor
11-24-2002, 12:02 PM
Well, it was a joke... sort of. There was a website put up where a guy put two RCA jacks onto the ends of an unshielded coathanger and plugged that into his receiver. Apparently he also had some capability to check the digital stream to see if any errors were being generated on the receiving end from the dolby digital decoder. He mentioned that he checked for quite some time and there were no errors accumulated at all. None! Every bit crossed the wire with no lost packets.
So he figured he must have made THE best cable in the world for digital audio and he would make one for anyone for the low, low price of some ridiculous amount in the thousands of dollars. Primarily he just wanted to show how ridiculous it was to pay an exhorbitant amount of money for a digital audio cable, since it will make virtually no difference considering that we are talking about a digital data stream, not an analog one. It was pretty fun, but an actual experiment that he performed.
