Audio Cable Experts please look!

Hey cable experts,

my situation is, I have a logitech X530 5.1inch speakers... with 3x 3.5mm output cable.

I wanted to connect my speakers to my laptop, logitech came with a 3x 3.5mm female socket converter to convert to 2x RCA female socket.

So what I did was, I bought a 2x RCA to 1x3.5mm cable which is then plugged into my laptop headphone jack.

It works fine, just now I got an ASUS Xonar U1 External USB 7.1 Sound Card. This awesome sound card supports both S/PDIF (toslink) and 3.5mm input. Unfortunate due to the design of the chassis, my (very thick) 2xRCA to 3.5mm cable is having trouble plugging in fully.

So now I have two options... Buy a 3.5mm extension cord...which will easily solve the problem OR try out this new (apparently better) S/PDIF socket. Instead of a 2xRCA to 3.5mm cable I use at the moment, I can buy a 2xRCA to S/PDIF cable.

If anyone could inform me which one would give a better sound quality, please advise ^___^

Thanks in Advance!

 

SPDIF is optical or coaxial digital output, it appears this unit uses optical burried inside the output jack with an adapter, so it won't do you any good unless the speakers have a toslink optical digital input available. I'd say you're stuck getting a short 3.5mm extension?

 

Ahh ok, so you're saying, unless the speakers itself has a Toslink cable ready to connect there's no point changing from 3.5mm to Toslink?

Thanks for the advice

 

You'd have to buy an expensive converter to go from toslink to RCA or 3.5mm cable, and it really wouldn't improve the audio quality at all. If the speakers had a toslink input then that'd be the way to go, but converting from digital to analog when you already have an analog out is counter productive really.

 

To get all the speakers working will involve alot of work

You will need a TOS link cable to link your laptop to a Dolby Digital decoding box, this decoding box could then output the 6 channels needed by your speakers to produce surround sound.

I used to have something similar to get DD5.1 from an old DVD player and feed a 6 channel amp and 6 speakers.

Better (and possibly cheaper) option may be to look at an external sound card for your laptop. If you get one with 6 channel output and USB input then you could just plug the USB cable in when needed to get 6 channel output.