Right now I have my TV, xbox and computer all right here. The sound for the computer and xbox goes to the cheap surround sound I have. My idea and problem right now is that A) I can't listen to the computer output and the xbox output at the same time which is sort of a pain B) The TV right now has no way to being outputted to the surround sound which would be nice for football games or whatever. BUT here's my idea, today in electronic music class (MIDI lab) we were reading about mixers preamps etc etc and I thought, why not have something like that for myset up at home? If I can get the right cables and adapters to go to a 1/4 jack in the mixer (which could be tough as all I've got for the TV is s-audio which I don't know much about) would this be a good idea?

In case you didn't get all that, I want to put a TV (s-audio jack), PC (1/8 mini jack), and xbox (RCA cables) into an audio mixer so that I can listen to and control all of them with one piece. This would be outputted to an RCA cable which would be pumped out to some surround sound.

Would this ruin all the surround sound (I'm pretty much assuming it would considering I don't know of a mixer that does 5.1 surround sound)? Would this ruin sound quality in general with all the jacks and adapters?


Much thanks in return.

You can get mixers that work with 5.1, but they would cost more than basic stereo mixers. Jacks and such themselves generally do not have a noticeable impact on sound quality, although if you get a digital mixer the signal will be converted from analogue to digital and back to analogue again, which would certainly impact it.

Does this sound like a reasonable idea or should there be another way i go about it?

I think you can get a pretty straightforward multi-way audio switcher that can do 5.1. Instead of a full mixer, you'd just have one knob that switches between different inputs and you'd output that to your surround sound input. That'd probably be cheaper and simpler.

Would that be capable of playing more than one input to the surround sound also? So playing xbox and listening to music from PC at the same time.

(11-17-2009 04:42 PM)drk229 Wrote:  Would that be capable of playing more than one input to the surround sound also? So playing xbox and listening to music from PC at the same time.

No. I didn't realise that was what you wanted to do; in that case, a mixer would probably be your best bet.