Sound problem and wiring confusion

The Setup:

pc is connected to tv with a dvi-hdmi cable for video and 3.5'" mini plug to 2 rca connectors single wire cable for audio.

tv is then connected to audio receiver via a cable with two rca jacks on each end.

2 front speakers, 2 rear speakers and a center speaker is connected to the audio reciever.

The Problem:

When i am listening to a movie with the audio from the computer, the spoken speech parts are so soft i have to really turn up the volume to hear it but then when a effects noise or music is played i get blown out of my seat.

The Question(s):

if i run a cable from tv digital audio out to digital audio in on my receiver, will i get better sound than the current 2 rca cable i am running between the two?

is the sound connection from my computer hampering me in anyway right now?, the new computer i am building has hdmi out on the motherboard.

would there be any specific audio settings in xbmc that could help my problem?

thankx
TC

Hmm, to me it sounds like your pc output is set to 5.1 mode and you connected just the two front channels with a stereo cable.
Speech is almost always ouput to the center channel and effects to the other 4 channels. So if you just connect the two front channels you only hear the front effects and sounds.

Set your pc to output in stereo or connect all the channels to the receiver.

vwolsink Wrote:Hmm, to me it sounds like your pc output is set to 5.1 mode and you connected just the two front channels with a stereo cable.
Speech is almost always ouput to the center channel and effects to the other 4 channels. So if you just connect the two front channels you only hear the front effects and sounds.

Set your pc to output in stereo or connect all the channels to the receiver.

thanks for the reply, i am still not getting it. My sound card driver interface has settings for 2,4,6 & 7.1 speaker setup, since i have 4 speakers and the center channel speaker i choose 4 speaker setup.

Surround sound is correct, most speech coming from center speaker and effects and other sounds coming from the 4 other speakers with right and left sounds being heard correctly.

The difference in volume between speech and effects appears to have corrected itself somehow but now the volume is so low all away around that i can barely hear anything without having to turn my receivers volume up to 50 which is twice as high compared to watching tv and i can still barely hear the movie.

The overall thing is though i am in the process of building a new htpc to take the place of this old computer and the new motherboard has hdmi audio and stuff so that setup is going to be completely different shortly anyway.

The computer that i am having problems with now is going upstairs into a bedroom where there is no multiple speaker seup, the aduio there will be over the tv speakers so problem solved there more than likely.

TC

This likely won't help you, but it's worth noting. One should probably never select anything other than 2 speaker setup from within Windows, if one is using an RCA connection. That wire is only designed to carry two channels. It simply has no way of carrying four. Thus, telling the computer to output to four speakers when a connection that can only handle two speakers is used will not work.

Unless I am misunderstanding you, that's my take on this case. The other thing to consider is all of the possible places sound can be turned down. Windows has its own sound control. XBMC has a sound control. Your TV probably has a sound control. And, finally, your receiver has a sound control. If your speakers have to be adjusted that high, there's a chance one of those items has been turned down accidentally.

I actually ran into that problem. One of the kinks I'm going to have to work out of my EventGhost configuration is pressing the skip down results in the volume going down in XBMC. Pressing the Volume Down button causes the volume in Windows to go down.

Weird problems.

This audio stuff is really starting to bother me. I still can't figure out why when i bring video out of the pc via a dvi connector to the hdmi port on the back of the tv and then bring the audio out of the pc with the single lime green connector wire from its sound card to the pc audio input on the back of the tv that the volume is almost non existent when playing movies with digital audio?

For this setup if i get a video card that has a hdmi connector off of it instead of the dvi connector would it bring both digital video and digital audio over on the same hdmi connector and then fix the low volume issue because now its digital audio instead of analog audio? (however see next setup)

To make matters worse i just built a htpc computer for downstairs at the big screen and it has hdmi straight off the mother board (the gigabyte board with the onboard geforce 9400) which is connected straight into the back of the tv via a hdmi cable but now i get no audio at all. Apparently this hdmi port is only carrying the video signal over and not the audio signal as well. So now i am going to have the same audio problem on this machine if i connected the single lime green analog cable from the sound card to the pc input on the tv. However on this motherboard unlike the other one it has a digital audio out and my receiver at the system has a digital audio in, if i connect a digital audio cable from the pc to the back of the receiver would i get the sound working and at the right volume?

If anyone could help that would great, i am about ready to throw in the towel on all this and just go back to manually burning movies to dvd disc and playing them in my upconvert dvd player at either location which provided me with perfect sound and video everytime.

TC

The correct answer above for the first problem is choose stereo out from the PC. You are losing channels by ordering it to be four channel, then using only one cable.

Multichannel assigns more of the soundcard jacks to sound. The mic input becomes a sound output, for eg.
It is no longer all coming out the green jack.

The receiver is simulating the surround, any time there is only a stereo input.

HDMI is another issue.
The process is not (likely) automatic in either device. Select
HDMI as the playback device on the PC and look for the TV audio input settings for the connection you are using.