Newbie to surround sound - help please?

[admin_exported]

I've had a set of 5.1 surround sound speakers kicking around for a few years now and never managed to get them connected up.

I'm not a purist so my equipment is at the cheaper end of the market (anyone heard of Shark?) and I don't know if it's worth even connecting it to my Panasonic Vieira 37" plasma that I got last year.

I had a look at the back of the TV and the audio output is L/R, but the back of the surround sound unit has connections for Stereo / Front / Rear / Subwoofer Centre. How do I connect these up? At the moment the only cable I can find is the one to connect into a PC. Would I be better connecting it into the back of other equipment such as the digi box or my DVD player rather than the TV? If I do that, will I only get the benefit of the surround sound for that particular piece of equipment?

As you can tell, this is all totally new to me! Any help would be appreciated.

Ally

 

[d4v3pum4]

The inputs you mention are for connection to a multi-channel analogue equipped source such as DVD, Bluray player or PC. Your TV will more than likely have analogue audio output (red/white marked with a circle with an arrow pointing outwards) so you could connect the TV using those to the Front Left/Right connections. Hopefully the h/c system (it would help if you specified the make/model number) will matrix this stereo input to give you pseudo surround out of all the speakers. It won't be true surround sound though. If you connect the source direct, i.e. DVD player or digi-box, you are right in that you will only get surround sound from that source only. However, routing via the TV will only ever result in stereo or at best a matrix effect such as dolby pro logic ii.

Does the home cinema system have any other inputs? What is the make/model number of it and also please detail your DVD player.

It does sound like you are due an upgrade to a new sound setup with sufficient inputs to cope with your current and future equipment needs. Separates are best.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi - thanks for your reply.

The surround sound system is a Shark S-750 (google doesn't bring anything up), the DVD player is a Toshiba SD-170EKB2 and only has L/R output, the digi box only has SCART connections.

Looks like I don't have any capacity for using the surround system at that rate. I expect I'll just have to wait until I can afford Blu-Ray or a PS3.