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kashirat · Dec 27, 2004, 01:45 PM

On my Powerbook (15" 1.5ghz..) there are two 1/8" audio jacks on the side, one for mic, one for headphones..

I'm trying to figure out a way to hook up my 4.1 speakers up to it without having to buy a separate USB optical input... I know on my PC the mic port can be shared to be used as a rear-channel speaker input. Does anyone know if this is possible? Is the mic port input only? If it isn't, I would imagine it would be at least *possible* to write some software to convert that mic port to a rear-channel speaker port...

Cheers and Happy New Year!

'kash

veauger · Dec 27, 2004, 04:16 PM

I can't seem to find any info on that anywhere. Does anyone know what sound system OSX uses? Is it something of Apple's own design, or is it open source stuff?

Scooterboy · Dec 28, 2004, 10:12 PM

If you're going to be hooking up quality speakers to your PowerBook I'd suggest the M-Audio Transit as it has high quality DAC's and the optical ports you need. Much better sound output than the headphone port of the PowerBook.

wuzup101 · Dec 29, 2004, 04:42 AM

I personally would recomend m-audio also. I have an m-audio sonica theater hooked up to a set of logitech z5500s and they sound great together!

reemas · Dec 29, 2004, 05:06 AM

i have an older but decent altec lansing 4.1 speaker system. it has an spdif connector, and 1/8th inch front and rear inputs. i saw the photos for the m-audio and dont see anything i could use.

is there something else or am i mistaken?

thanks!

tooki · Dec 29, 2004, 01:45 PM

You can't make the audio input into a secondary output. To this day, no Mac has built-in analog surround capability. (The G5 models can output Dolby Digital surround via optical only.)

If you want surround on a PowerBook, you have no choice but to buy a USB surround interface.

As for the sound infrastructure in Mac OS X: no, Apple didn't use any of the god-awful open-source audio software. It uses its own from-scratch system called Core Audio, which natively supports multichannel, high sample rate, high resolution audio with extremely low latency. Core Audio is superbly implemented and has been held in very high regard by the audio industry.

Scooterboy: the audio hardware in the 15" Aluminum PowerBooks is actually pretty good. It's 44.1KHz 24-bit. Only the Power Mac G5, with its 48KHz 24-bit audio, and the iMac G5, with its built-in 96KHz 24-bit converters, have superior integrated audio.

tooki

tooki · 01:56 PM

Originally posted by reemas:
i have an older but decent altec lansing 4.1 speaker system. it has an spdif connector, and 1/8th inch front and rear inputs. i saw the photos for the m-audio and dont see anything i could use.

The Transit has an optical (TOSLINK) S/PDIF output. If the Altec Lansings only have a coaxial S/PDIF input, then either find a different USB device that does have coax (which is rarer, I'll tell ya), or get a TOSLINK-to-coax converter.

Note that the only slightly more expensive M-Audio Sonica Theater has both analog surround outputs as well as coaxial output (but no optical output).

tooki

anamexis · Dec 30, 2004, 07:00 PM

Originally posted by tooki:
The Transit has an optical (TOSLINK) S/PDIF output. If the Altec Lansings only have a coaxial S/PDIF input, then either find a different USB device that does have coax (which is rarer, I'll tell ya), or get a TOSLINK-to-coax converter.

Note that the only slightly more expensive M-Audio Sonica Theater has both analog surround outputs as well as coaxial output (but no optical output).

tooki

It is worth note that with the M-Audio Sonica as with any surround sound audio interface that relies on software decoding, you will not get actual surround sound from DVD Player. To quote from the Sonica Theater manual:

There is currently no DVD player for Mac OS 9 or X that supports software decode of Dolby Digital or DTS,but Sonica Theater�s CircleSurround II technology does a remarkable job of generating a real surround soundtrack from the Apple DVD Player application.

In other words, it will not use the actual surround mix from the DVD, but its software will attempt to recreate the surround sound mix from the stereo track. I haven't heard what this sounds like myself, but its just something that could be confusing.

reemas · Dec 31, 2004, 03:32 AM

i dont know if this should be a new thread, but i'll post here first...

i just got the logitech z-5500 5.1 speaker system. this is an amazing system with plenty of different inputs.

i would use it with apples dvd player, but im guessing there is no way to get dts 5.1 sound? im a bit lost on this one.

tooki · Dec 31, 2004, 05:21 AM

Originally posted by anamexis:
It is worth note that with the M-Audio Sonica as with any surround sound audio interface that relies on software decoding, you will not get actual surround sound from DVD Player. To quote from the Sonica Theater manual:

In other words, it will not use the actual surround mix from the DVD, but its software will attempt to recreate the surround sound mix from the stereo track. I haven't heard what this sounds like myself, but its just something that could be confusing.

Hmm... the M-Audio devices do claim to have Dolby Digital and DTS passthrough, consistent with DVD Player's support for outputting those surround streams via the G5's optical audio output.

tooki