5.1 Speaker Setup for my PC only

[mkell]

Afternoon everyone

Im after some more advice.

Looking for a decent 5.1 setup for my pc.

I currently have a gigabyte p55-ud3

I am going to buy a sound card but I'm unsure on which speakers I should get.

At the most I would like to spend £200

I is mostly going to be used for gaming.

I was looking at these as currys and pc world have them in for £140 but I cant find out what connections are on the back of the sub

Onkyo HT528



Any info would be great

[Infinite]

That's just speakers and sub, no amplifier hence, no connections on the back of the sub appart from the sound input, i think.

[Phage]

The standard is the z5500 I think, but they are quite pricey. Possibly the Logitech G51.

[vicedens2002]

I would say asus xonar DX soundcard, awesome sound.

[Pob255]

Well I'm going to start with a couple of bits of advice.

Don't spend moeny on a sound card or high end speaker set IF you cannot setup your speakers correctly due to limitations of your room.

Pet peeve of mine, I'm no audiophile, but I do know the speaker setup makes a major difference.
It's why I use onboard sound and a cheap set of trust 5.1 speakers, I cannot set the speakers up correctly due to room limitations and throwing money at a speaker set is not going to change that.

If I really wanted good 5.1 for myself then a decent headset would be a better option and it's one you should probably consider too.

[mkell]

Don't spend moeny on a sound card or high end speaker set IF you cannot setup your speakers correctly due to limitations of your room.

Cheers pob.

The area I will have the speakers in will be quite small. Its about 2 meters wide by 4 meters long.

The center speaker would be under my monitor with each of the front satellites about 1 meter from that.
The rear speakers would be about 3 meters away from my center speaker.

Am I right in thinking this would be the correct layout for the speakers?

I may just go for a 2.1 setup. I've been looking at the Onkyo HTX 22HDX and If I ever decide I need 5.1 or move to a bigger room I can buy the additional speakers.

Does anyone know of any similar 2.1 speakers sets which can be upgraded to 5.1 if needed?

[Jasp]

The HDX is a excellent bit of kit, currently got one on the downstairs TV running in 2.1, you get the most by adding a centre speaker mind you to do 3.1 as a lot of the extra sound options are turned off in 2.1 like game/movie/etc

[Pob255]

Small area is not the issue, getting them in the correct place is, currently I cannot put the rear speakers behind me (so they have to go on the floor by my feet) and my left+right+front are all too high up.

As Jasp has said it's actually fairly easy to combine speaker sets, back when I could actually put speakers behind me (a good while ago) I had a 4.0 setup, running front speakers to an old cheap hi-fi and rear as a pair of desktop speakers, it worked very well.

The main issue I can foresee is that most 2.1 speakers, while it's a separate base, it's not a separate base feed, which it is for a true 5.1 setup, standardly you're using 3 stereo jacks, 1st to do left/right, 2nd for rear left/rear right and the 3rd for center/sub woofer
A 2.1 setup generally just takes the stereo left/right feed and passes low frequency sounds from both channels to the sub woofer.
That's for a pc at any rate, it's the sound card that's breaking it all up into separate feeds.

Something like that Onkyo HTX 22HDX which is designed for tv/media not a pc, sound via hdmi is something I've not really gone into, what's done here (as I understand it) is some cleaver encoding to jam a 5.1 feed into a digital stereo feed, which is then decoded at the speaker end.

I'm no audiophile, I don't care about true fidelity and stuff like that, but I also know the good surround sound is highly dependent on good speaker placement and all too often I see people with expensive kit which is pretty much going to waste because they don't have it correctly positioned and you can get better results from 2 pairs of desktop speakers in the right place.

Like I said it's a bit of a pet peeve to me, right up there with sales staff who sell people highend pc's to browse the internet.

[IronWarrior]

Pob255 has a small point, but nothing to worry or care much about.

5.1 or 7.1 speaker setups sound ****ing awesome, just because you didn't set them to X or Y positions that have been aligned to the planets won't lower the fact that when you playing music or watching a movie or gaming for that matter, it won't sound any less awesome.

I'm sure a proper audiophile will care, but for most people as long you can setup the speakers close enough to their correct positions it be alright.