Well the Kitchen A/V system is rockin'. I actually eliminated the living room amp and ran the living room speakers off of the kitchen set up. Perceptive readers may wonder "but that's two sets of speakers in the kitchen and one set in the living room." Yes! I wired the kitchen speakers in series, so they are effectively one set as far as the amp is concerned (plus to minus is one line, minus to plus is the other). Now the kitchen is Speaker A and the living room is Speaker B.
The Dell XPS One is driving most of the music, although I have a tuner on the amp and I also ran a Zune dock straight into another input to bypass the PC. This makes it easy to play tunes while someone else is on the PC.
One challenge is how to p;lay the audio from the PC speakers and the external audio simultaneously. Right now I have to pick a default audio playback device - the internal speakers or the external USB to RCA audio adapter. What I really want is to run both at once so that I can just turn on the amp to add big speaker sound when I want, rather than right clicking on the speaker icon and changing the default!
I haven't figured it out yet . . . any suggestions?
Windows Vista won't allow you to use two audio out devices, you have to choose one. Many people have the same problem with Media Center PCs in that they wish to simultanously like to use digital and analog out, but can't. One solution to drive two sources is a either via simple cable splitter- your local radio shack has 'em or you can order them for the cheap at places like Monoprice.com the other way is to use a cheap mixer so you can control the gain and volume level of each output.
Posted by: Steven Hughes | August 20, 2008 at 07:10 AM