help connecting sound card to receiver for 5.1

[vorius]

So my current HTPC had a Sound Blaster sound card, I think the model is X-fi extreme or something like that. It came with a chart which showed a bunch of various ways to connect it to the different speaker configurations. For 5.1 it had a diagram showing the wires coming out of output ports 1-3 to jacks on a receiver which simply dont seem to exist on any receiver I have seen. It seems to suggest that receivers would have minijack inputs for front, rear and center/subwoofer. Anyway I was only able to get two speakers to work, the front L & R.

So then I go out and buy a new sound card thinking Sound Blaster is a POS. I get an Auzentech X-Plosion card, it looks like it's made for home theatre with outputs that make sense, even has SPDIF optical/coax outputs. I get excited about this because I thought I remember seeing optical/coax inputs on my receiver. But then when I look again I notice the optical/coax inputs on my receiver are in a boxed section called Digital but the actual inputs are named "Optical Video 2 In" and "DVD In Coaxial" ??? That almost makes me think they are expecting video not audio ?

Anyway I'd be trying them right now but I am still waiting for one more computer card so that I do everythign at once (new sound card is not instlaled yet)

Also, what produces better quality, the optical or digital coax?

[malore]

Creative sells special cables to connect using the 3 jacks, but it would be an analog connection and all Dolby Digital and DTS decoding would have to be done by the audio card and not your receiver.

This post seems to have a good intro to digital connections.

As far as audio cards go, I believe Sound Blaster is still the king at least for gaming.

The names on you receiver just means that the audio is linked to the DVD or Video 2 setting. So to hear the audio you plugged into "DVD In Coaxial" you need the receiver set to DVD. You may also have to do some additional setup to tell the receiver to used the coaxial in, if it doesn't automatically switch.

[GTwannabe]

Quality will be the same over both coax and optical. You may need to remap the digital input on the receiver to the correct video input (if you run video through it as well).