Want to setup a home theatre

[antarcticprince]

I had a philips home theatre system which got fried last year during a thunder storm.
The company guys asked for Rs 8000 to repair it. Toooo much so we bought a new system. As the make was almost the same, we never opened the new speakers. I got my old system back and it is still FRIED!!!! I got the speaker connector disconnected from the system and now i have a 5.1 system which i want to use for my PC. Please advise how to make one from 5.1 speakers and the connector. My motherboard has support for 7.1 speakers. So what all must i do?

 

[Torch]

You have a couple of options.

If you want relatively acceptable compressed audio:

Buy a sound card which can do Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect encoding such as the X-Fi Titanium. You can get a low end 5.1 receiver for cheap which has an SPDIF input for Dolby Digital/DTS. Connect the PC to the receiver with an optical or coaxial SPDIF cable for compressed 5.1.

If you want good sound quality over analog:

Buy a decent sound card for quality analog output (basic card like an Audigy). You need to buy an old amplifier/AV receiver with 5.1 multichannel analog input such as the Yamaha HTR-6230. These are VERY hard to get in 2011 and among the current line up only the very high-end models have multichannel analog input. All the cheaper models only have HDMI or SPDIF. Don't get scammed by salesmen; verify the 5.1 analog input yourself. Frankly it's not worth getting an outdated analog system at this cost.