I have a common garden variety 5.1 home theater system. However, when I plug the sound card's output to the L&R RCA jacks on the back of the home theater receiver, I lose surround.

What do I need to connect the card to my theater without losing surround? There are several outputs on the card:

1. Digital S/PDIF
2. Front LR
3. Rear LR
4. Center + SW

This message was edited by tomkyn on 09/02/04 23:24 ET.

I think you will find this cannot be done, as crazy as it sounds.

I have the Platinum card (predecessor to the Audigy), and it has the same outputs. I have a Denon AVR4800, and there is no way I can get surround with a digital connection.

It was over a year ago I tried to do this, and it was really frustrating - I have computer games on the big screen and I want to listen with my quality HT gear instead of the cheesy computer speakers, but after researching it I discovered the s/pdif output of the card does NOT output surround, as you have also discovered. Some garbage about copyright or something.

The ONLY way to get surround into your HT system from your computer card is by analog, which will only work for you if your receiver has a six or seven channel input, and you'll have to make a custom cable splitting the mini phone plug analog surround outputs from your card into RCA jacks for your receiver.

In my case my DVD Audio connections take up the 6 channel input on the receiver so unless I want to plug and unplug (NOT!) or buy a switchbox (and degrade the sound quality of my DVD audio inputs - NOT!), I have to live with not being able to use my HT system to play surround from the computer. My compromise is to use the stereo S/pdif signal and set the receiver to 7 channel stereo, which sounds great but loses some of the surround effects in some games.

AAArgh, i feel your pain...:-(

Doug