Speakers for PC and Xbox 360

[adamsonm]

Hi, I'm having trouble choosing a set of speakers that can be used to connect to my PC and Xbox 360. They can be either 2.1 or 5.1 sets of speakers. The problem is I don't know what I'm looking for in terms of specs that will enable me to connect the speakers to my pc to get sound out of my PC and to get sound out of my Xbox 360. I will be connecting my monitor to the tower with a hdmi to dvi cable, and i will be connecting my xbox 360 to the monitor with a hdmi cable. The monitor is a 22" Viewsonic VX2260WM. Although the monitor does have speakers built in it ( they are not very good ), I don't want to use them. Any ideas?

Here are the connectors of the monitor itself.
Connectors:
1 x Audio Line-In
1 x Audio Line-Out
1 x D-Sub
1 x DVI-D
1 x HDMI

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R, Intel X58, S1366, SLi/Xfire PCI-E 2.0, DDR3 2200/1333, SATA 6Gb/s, RAID, ATX.

[Champman99]

Hi there, there are potentially lots of affordable sets which can do what you ask.

If I've understood the situation correctly this should be easy to achieve, you can simply run the line out from the monitor to your speakers main input, and that should provide the Xbox 360 sound when you are switched to that HDMI input.

For the PC, I am asuming that as you are DVI-HDMI rather than HDMI-HDMI sound will not be carried at present, therefore you will want some speakers with a second input. Potentially this can be as simple as on my Logitech X4's, a 3.5mm jack on the front of the wired remote, designed for plugging in Mp3 players.

From there you can simply run a 3.5mm - 3.5mm cable (available cheaply on ebay if you dont already have one). That should do it. Any sort of speakers with a secondary 3.5mm (probably on the remote like mine, but may also be on the sub) should get the lob done.

Hope that helps.

[adamsonm]

Thanks chapman, thats exactly what i had in mind. One more query though, how do I know that the speakers that im looking for have the two inputs im looking for? Or give me some examples of these types of speakers.

[Champman99]

Sorry I did give an example but wrong name. My current speakers are Logitech Z4's (not X4's) which are decent 2.1 set, although they have gone up in price since I bought them (seem to be at least £60, I think I paid around 40-45)

This is how it works for them, this is the wired remote, and you can see on the right of the headphone socket is another 3.5mm labelled with a musical note.



It is tough to know in advance whether specific sets have additional inputs, it might be a case of finding a review that mentions it, as the online retailers dont seem to list things like that clearly. Or finding a picture with the connector in.

My former speakers were a 2.0 set which were actually superior to the X4s despite no subwoofer, those were Creative Gigaworks T40 Series II, they also have an aux input in the front, in addition to their main 3.5mm connector.

[adamsonm]

Great! That is really helpful. Thanks for the info!!