How to connect a PC to stereo amplifier and hifi speakers

It isn’t uncommon to have your entire collection of music on a PC or Mac, particularly if your CD collection was accidentally left on a parcel shelf and half-inched in broad daylight, which is probably why you are wondering how to connect a PC to stereo amplifier and hifi speakers.

With the ability to store tens of thousands of tracks, a digital collection saves having lots of discs clogging up your house, and although the physicality of a CD or vinyl collection can’t be beaten – especially as you can’t show an MP3 to your grandchildren, digital is far more practical.

You don’t have to skimp on sound quality just because you want to rely on your digital music collection, though. The only hurdle is finding a way of connecting your hifi up to your PC or laptop without going the 2.0 or 2.1 computer speaker route – no offense meant to some of the great budget speaker sets out there as they offer great value for money.

As sophisticated as both PCs and hifi systems have become, bridging the two types of audio is still not particularly easy. In fact, there are numerous ways with their own benefits and drawbacks. Certain options aren’t cheap, either, so not always an option.

The purpose of this article is to show you the various different ways you can listen to your music collection on a PC through your pride and joy speakers, factoring in costs, performance and general hassle. Installing a soundcard will take more know-how than plugging in a wire into a 3.5mm connection, for instance.

As I go along I will update the article, so feel free to get in touch to suggest anything I might have missed. When all is said and done I want this to be a resource for any hifi enthusiast who wants their PC to become part of their hifi.

Please note: This was originally posted on License to Quill, which has now been shutdown. It is here for posterity.

The cheap option: 3.5mm to RCA

If you spin your amplifier around you should find some red and white connectors, known as RCA or phono connectors. Most amplifiers will have at least one set, usually more, so you can have your Xbox 360 or PS3 running into the amp, as well as your PC, Mac or laptop. If you think of the amp as ‘heart’ of the operation, pumping out the sound, it makes sense everything connects to it.

Why do you need to connect the PC to the amp? Because whilst the amp is the heart for creating sound it needs something to pump to your speakers, and the PC, radio or a CD player effectively plays that role in all of this. It sounds bloody obvious, but when connecting up multiple sources it can make it a lot easier to work out if you imagine the amplifier/receiver as the centre of everything.

A quick look at the back of your computer should reveal a few coloured inputs, or one that is designed for 3.5mm jacks – the connection you use to connect standard headphones and earphones. If you have a reasonably good motherboard or dedicated sound card it should be green or have a picture of a set of headphones nearby. Some computers may have it on the front so bear that in mind if you are struggling to find it.

It might be you have headphones with the larger jack size. In which case, you will need an adapter (usually supplied or head to somewhere like Maplin) or a fancy sound card that can accommodate, like the Asus Xonar Essence ST or STX.

Once you have established you have the above, you need the correct wire to bridge the gap. That wire is cunningly called a 3.5mm to RCA converter, and fortunately you can get one for under a tenner.

Which one should you get? Pick a retailer you trust, do some internet searching and read customer reviews. Or alternatively use the one I bought above. I can’t vouch for whether it’s the best on the market – I’ll leave that to the likes of What HiFi to decide. Just know that it works.

Fitting

So you have your wire and both connections ready to go. All you need to do now is put the red and white RCA into the correct RCA connectors on the amplifier. You can use anything on the back that is free except the connection named phono. This is designed for connecting a record player or turntable if you prefer, and it won’t work, unless you enjoy copious amounts of distortion.

Please note phono connectors and the phono connection is different. If it’s red and white and doesn’t say phono then it will be fine. If you accidentally use the record player phono connection you will soon know – the sound is a dead giveaway.

Be sure to turn your amplifier volume as low as possible at this stage and then connect the 3.5mm end of the cable into your sound card or motherboard. Bam, you are good to go. Slowly up the volume with a song playing to see if it has worked. If you don’t hear sound, check you are in the correct audio connection on your PC or laptop. More often than not, there is more than one choice.

Xbox 360 / Playstation 3 connection

So you want to play console games through your amplifier, as well as your PC? If you have another spare set of RCA connectors on your amp then you can. You won’t get 5.1 surround sound in this way, if you were thinking of connecting your 5.1 speaker set, but it does mean you no longer have to rely on tiny PC speaker offerings.

To fit them you only need to connect the red and white RCA wires from the games console into the back of the amp and you are good to go – avoiding the phono channel for record players (again). Remember you will need to switch to the source you chose on the amplifier to hear anything, something that should be fairly easy as it’s usually a spin of a wheel or a button press away. On my Yamaha AS-500 it’s a twist of a button – dead easy.

HDMI

“I have HDMI, what can I do?” If like me you connect your Xbox to a television or monitor via an HDMI cable, which means sound and video is taken care of in one wire, panic not.

Dig out your old cable (the one with RCA connectors you got with the console) and hook it up to your amp as instructed above. Leave the HDMI connected as normal. In theory your sound should now come through your stereo and your picture is taken care of by the HDMI, as before. Stereo sound and high quality visuals – beautiful.

Beautiful until you actually try this method. In Microsoft’s wisdom or sheer stupidity, you have to either modify your Xbox 360 AV cable to allow both it and the HDMI to be plugged in at once. Click the link below for a video I found on YouTube on how to do this simple modification.

The other option is head on over to Amazon to purchase a little gadget known as a Xbox 360 HDMI AV cable and Optical RCA adapter. Microsoft used to offer its own version but I believe it was stopped, leaving this under-a-tenner option as the only one. You can still get the official one but it is a little more pricey and usually it will be a used one.

Having used the first, free option – at least until my parcel arrives from Amazon – I can vouch it works perfectly. However, I would like to point out that if connected to a monitor instead of a television, switching the input from PC to Xbox restarts the games console. It’s as if my screen has to reattempt the handshake to get HDMI going. From the look of certain Amazon reviews, both options suffer from the same issue.

It isn’t a deal-breaker and not everyone seems to experience the problem either, but worth pointing out in case you notice it and start to panic. If anyone knows the exact reason please let me know – I’m quite curious.

Whilst I am on the subject, both of these methods will allow you to use headsets that require RCA inputs such as the Plantronics’ Gamecom X40, or for Turtle Beach headsets that need HDMI for sound.

The internal option: Audio soundcard

This was my first choice when it came to connecting my PC to my hifi. There’s no need to sit anything on the desk and you get SNR scores most music enthusiasts would be proud of. Unfortunately, there are a few negatives.

The main issue is having your PC so close to your hifi. If, like me, you made the mistake of buying a 1 metre RCA-to-RCA cable and your case tower is basically a small tower-block it can get slightly annoying, especially if you want it all tucked under your desk. Getting a 2 metre cable helps things a lot, but still bear distance in mind when planning out where everything is going to go.

Issue number two is the need for manufacturers to opt for PCI slots over PCIe. The latest version of the Asus Xonar Essence ST has a dedicated power supply connector, which is meant to improve performance, but a lot of motherboards are becoming less likely to offer the slot you need, particularly in the M-ATX motherboard area.

Auzentech’s X-Meridian 7.12G is another hifi-oriented sound card but too requires a PCI slot. If you are planning on upgrading or you have a fairly new system, just check you have a spare PCI slot floating about.

Both of the above cards weigh in at over one hundred pounds, quite a lot more actually, but there are alternatives. You lose the RCA connection though, so it’s probably best to spend a bit more or just rely on the 3.5mm cable option above.