Sharing one set of 5.1 speakers between two computers?

April 10, 2006 10:43 AM

Sharing one set of 5.1 speakers between two computers?

I have a homebuilt pc with an Audigy 4, a Mac Mini with a single sound out mini-jack, and Creative 5.1 speakers. My KVM switch scrambles the sound horribly, so I want to find another way of sharing the speakers between the two computers, that doesn't involve unplugging stuff when I want to switch between the two. Any suggestions please?

posted by kenchie to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Do the speakers have a digital SPDIF output? If you hook them up to your PC with SPDIF, and the mac with analog, the speakers may switch or mix the two. I managed to do that with a set of old Boston Acoustics computer speakers once.
posted by zsazsa at 10:57 AM on April 10, 2006

Er, I meant to ask if the speakers have an SPDIF input.
posted by zsazsa at 10:58 AM on April 10, 2006

Does the mini have a line in?

I had a similar situation with a PC and an eMac, and ended up using LineIn to route the line in (connected to the eMac from the PC's sound card) to the output on the eMac, which was connected to my nice external speakers.

LineIn is free, and the stereo cable to connect the PC to the eMac was around $4 at RadioShack.
posted by mph at 11:00 AM on April 10, 2006

Get an A/B switch for RCA jacks, and then get some RCA-stereo converter cables.

I looked around but couldn't find an A/B switch for non-RCA. Sorry...
posted by voidcontext at 11:07 AM on April 10, 2006

Response by poster: It's an early Mac Mini with no audio in.
posted by kenchie at 11:21 AM on April 10, 2006