Have the standard jack socket on back of pc,with the right lead can i connect this to my amplifier?

Basically for playing music.

 

yup,

Go from the jack on the back of PC to 2 phono (black + red plugs usualy)

 

Mines hooked up via a dolby digital output

 

From your pc WWSD?..is that a special output?

Okay.....got it wired up,single jack from pc to double lead into spare line input on amp.
First impression,sounds okay,but still not a patch on normal cd player.Listening first using pc as source then cd player....loads of difference(not unexpected i guess).

 

Yep, got mine wired up to my old 70's sony Hi-fi 2x40 "propper" watts RMS. Blows me away when cranked up

Just need a 3.5mm jack to stereo phono lead.

Can go the digital route if your sound card has a digi out and your Hi-fi had a digi input. I think most are coax rather than optical though.

 

Never going to sound much cop I'm afraid compared to a standalone CD player. Naff PSU in PC/cheap electronics/long signal route etc.

Looking at it from another angle though, your PC speakers will never sound as good as your hi-fi.

 

Pualr are you listening from your CDROM digitally or analogue ? I find it can sound pants with it set on digital extraction. (Seems ok on mp3 though )

Also any "fancy" sound effect option tend to make it sound crap to - like SRS effects,Trubass, surround etc bundled with media player.

If that doesn't help, could be your card is crap. Alot of cheap sound cards still use 741 op-amps as signal drivers (i.e poor for audio quality)

 

My hifi speakers are loads better than pc speakers,yes you're right on that.Also makes my desk less cluttered doing away with my pc speakers.

Ali....isnt all output from your cdrom drive digital?...as for sound effects i think most are turned off,but its something i'll check.
Basically its probably what you say,just cheap components,£20-30 in my pc compared to £250 in my standalone cd player.

If i wanted to upgrade my pc to hifi quality cd/mp3 sound is this possible....what would you need to do?

 

Get yourself one of those soundcards with a tube output stage

Dead gimmicky but would probably sound lurvely. Hmmmm, valves.

 

With most CD-Rom drives (or DVD, CD-RW's etc ) You have up to 3 options of the way audio data is transferred (In terms of normal audio CD's - NOT mp3's etc).

1st is via the IDE interface (same way as normal data is tranferred) This relies heavily on the sound card and software to process the audio.

2nd is via the analogue output. There should be a "Line-out" on the back of the drive, this uses the CD-Rom's own processing, and outputs normal analogue audio at line level. The sound card will have a corresponding line-in for this. All the sound card does is just "pass-on" the signal without any processing (except volume control).

3rd is via a digtal out-put where audio is trasmitted digitally, this works pretty much like the 1st method. But probably uses less sytem resources, as less (or no) software is required to process the music.

I personally find option 2 to get the best results when used with standard hum-drum sound cards.

 

I've got my laptop connected to my hifi at work and although it upset my boss it works fine. I just made a lead from the headphone plug to two phono leads in the aux port of my hifi Scares the **** out of everyone in the office if I forget to turn the volume down and an email comes in

Paul

 

Thanks for that explanation Ali...

 

Get an FM sender - plug into the computer headphone socket and sends FM signal at least 50 foot I would say. My mate has one and they are pretty awesome, can send your music to any tuner, plug it into an Ipod and send it to your car radio if ya like!

 

Or how about one of these, this is what i have been looking for for some time. Looks quite smart too.

pc to hi fi mp3 converter. £300 notes.