Subwoofer is black/red wire connection

Alienwho

Diamond Member
Apr 22, 2001
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Anything I can do to reuse an old RCA subwoofer that has nothing but a black/red wire coming out of it. It was part of a HTIB that had connectors on the receiver. My new receiver (Pioneer VSX-919) wants a regular subwoofer cable.
 

3chordcharlie

Diamond Member
Mar 30, 2004
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No, you have a passive sub that needs power from an amplifier, and your new system is designed to work with a powered sub (one with it's own amplifier).

edit - you might be able to feed the subwoofer signal into your old receiver, and powere the sub that way, if you don't mind running both receivers.
 

Alienwho

Diamond Member
Apr 22, 2001
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Hmm...darn.

New question then. Is it possible to run both of my monitors through the DVI output on my graphics card, and use the motherboard's onboard HDMI for audio only out to the receiver? I'm trying to set this up and I don't want to connect it with a ghetto green cable to the onboard sound card with a red/white connector to the receiver.


My motherboard has an optical port, maybe that would be easiest? I don't have an optical cord though but I have a bunch of HDMI's.
 

3chordcharlie

Diamond Member
Mar 30, 2004
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I would imagine optical, or 6-channel analog from your soundcard will be the way to go here. I'm sure others in here know a whole lot more about computer audio connections.
 

PM650

Senior member
Jul 7, 2009
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Will your receiver decode hdmi audio streams? If not, optical is the only option, although I don't think anything other than movies will send multi-channel over optical unless your sound card supports DTS Connect and/or Dolby Digital Live (I could be wrong). Although DVI physically supports analog & digital signals, I don't believe it can send different video streams through both simultaneously; I'm not aware of any adapters that would support two monitors even if that was possible, however.
 

manimal

Lifer
Mar 30, 2007
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What graphics card do you have? A cheap ati card like a 4550 will send audio and video via hdmi and will simplify your setup.
 

Alienwho

Diamond Member
Apr 22, 2001
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This is starting to piss me off. I got an optical cable and plugged it in and sure sound comes from all 5 but it's not true surround sound. I can't manually change my speaker settings using software (Via HD Audio Deck in Windows 7).

I was always under the impression that the whole using a receiver with your computer thing was easy. This is a much bigger nightmare than my old klipsch promedia 5.1 setup, plug and play.

btw I have an ASRock 790GXH and 4770. A new videocard would do nothing. I want to use both my DVI ports on the 4770 normal as I am now with dual monitor. I just want to use the motherboard's built in HDMI port for audio, directly to the receiver and speakers.
 

Alienwho

Diamond Member
Apr 22, 2001
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I've come to realize that the software for my VIA onboard audio sucks badly. I can't find anything on AC3 filter.

In other news I ran to best buy and bought this $100 Sony 10" 100watt sub for $65. I told the guy to price match amazons $79.99 price or I'm walking. When he rung it up it came to $65. :confused: . Who am I to argue with that.
 

PM650

Senior member
Jul 7, 2009
476
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Good job on the sub; I prefer my electronics thoroughly broken & cheap but the monetary result is the same :D

You might be able to manipulate the filter settings better if you use a codec pack (like k-lite or cole2k) instead of whatever you're using now.