[OmniX]

I am a bit of an audio newbie but would like to purchase a pair of decent speakers for my Powerbook (Ti/550).
Would it make sense to purchase a 5.1 speaker set? Since the Powerbook only has stereo out (right?), would only 2 of the speakers be utilized?
Furthermore, has anyone had any experience with the Logitech Z-640 system?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/comments.

[Tetsuo]

You would need to buy a Sonica Theater external sound card to take advantage of your rear and centre speakers.

[t_hah]

Sonica works fine on my PowerBook. Just do not install the M-Audio drivers because they will screw up your OS big time and yuo will not be able to remove it without any problems.

If you buy sonica use the built in Panther drivers. Panther will recognize Sonica Theater for you.


t

[OmniX]

without the USB external sound card, would the center and rear speakers not work at all (i.e. no sound output), or would they just default to outputting the L/R audio channels?

[fraeone]

First off, let me say that in no way do you need to buy another soundcard, that's nuts. You have one built into your Tibook and it works fine.

Center channel is a no-brainer. I have the Z-640s and they have a button called "Matrix" which takes stereo input and pretends its Dolby or something, which essentially means they send much of their signal to the center channel. It works pretty well.

If you want all 5 channels, the Z-640s also come with an adapter for that. It's really meant for your Gamecube/XBOX, but it will work great for your purposes too. The included adapter is a little plug that takes Red/White AV inputs like what you see on your home stereo and outputs them to two stereo miniplugs that the speakers plug in to. All you would need is a stereo miniplug -> stereo a/v adapter which I purchased at radio shack for about 5 bucks.

All in all, they're great speakers and I would highly recommend them.