Odiously because it is NOT the ONLY WAY TO HOOK UP THE AVR!
The OP's system can also use Toslink and even RCA! Why are you so stuck on ONLY offing ONE choice?
If it was the only true way then like I said everything else would be obsolete and NOT even in existence at all.
I mean even compute speaker systems would use them! AND NOT ONE OF THEM DO NOT ONE COMPUTER SPEAKER SYSTEM USES HDMI FOR A HOOKUP .
HDMI HOOK UP IS FOR VIDEO THAT IS WHAT 99.9999999999% of the common consumer knows and thinks, NOT one common normal every day user is thinking HMM HDMI is great for sound! OR I need an HDMI cable to hook my computer up. ! This is so lame an argument! It makes no sense at all.
BEFORE HDMI THERE WAS AND STILL IS Other ways to get surround sound. Jess I wounder how I get it?
Oh NO you do not get it at all then what the HELL is it? YOU are muddying up the water and confusing.
Wow, dude, you need to calm down. Seriously.
First off: I never said it was the only way. Stop putting words in my mouth, please. I said it was the obvious way. Why? Because it is. This is an AV Receiver - an Audio Video Receiver. It belongs in an Audio Video setup - i.e. alongside a TV, projector or similar display solution. There thus needs to be a display cable hooked up no matter what. This receiver has the ability to pass through HDMI video while making use of HDMI audio - which, among other things, supports 5.1 surround like the OP is asking for. Hence, using an HDMI cable, they only need to run a single cable, and everything should work out of the box with minimal setup required.
As for offering only one choice: why not? Making three-four different suggestions at one time is a
terrible way of giving advice. Unless you want to overwhelm someone into giving up right away, present them with what you believe is the simplest and best option first, and then move on to other possibilities if this does not work. In this case, HDMI is the simplest and best solution.
Beyond the obvious disadvantage of anything else requiring a second cable, there's also the point that HDMI has higher bandwidth - also for audio - than TOSLINK / S/PDIF allowing for uncompressed surround sound or more channels. This might not matter, but as demonstrated above (you need a sound card capable of real-time compression and encoding, among other things) there are significant drawbacks to using TOSLINK for surround from a PC. This doesn't mean it can't work, it's just a bit complicated. RCA is analog, and as such very susceptible to signal noise and interference, and should thus be avoided. The receiver is also likely to have a better DAC than the sound card in the PC. Again: can be used, but HDMI is a better option.
As for this statement:
If it was the only true way then like I said everything else would be obsolete and NOT even in existence at all.
That's not how the real world works. Old and obsolete or semi-obsolete standards take a long, long time to disappear as equipment manufacturers want to maintain compatibility across whatever other equipment a buyer has. And again, neither I nor anyone else in this thread has said that HDMI is the only audio transfer standard in use, or that's relevant - just that it's the highest bandwidth one and the one most applicable to the OP's use case, and as such is the obvious choice to the exclusion of all others.
As for computer speakers not using HDMI, there are multiple factors to this:
- They are generally not made for home theater/living room AV use, and HDMI is primarily a home theater/living room AV standard - and the dominant one at that. Everything AV from recent years uses HDMI. The PC industry prefers DisplayPort.
- HDMI is not a free standard, meaning that speaker manufacturers would need to pay royalties if they started using it.
- PC audio is very different from living room audio. Most users keep a pair of simple speakers for a long time, or use headphones. Very few have a receiver or amplifier as part of their PC setup. These aren't
common in people's living rooms either, but much more common than around PCs.
- Passing your video signal through a central "hub" (receiver) before reaching your monitor in a PC setup makes very little sense - most monitors have one device only connected. Most TVs have multiple devices, making HDMI-switching receivers a natural fit. Again: different standards for different use cases.
- Audio integrated into the display signal in the PC world is a much more recent innovation than in the AV world where it has always been the case (well, technically RCA used a bundle of separate cables, but they all belonged together). HDMI took over after SCART, which also had both audio and video. Sound was tacked onto DVI as an optional addition, but never really integrated into PC display standards before DisplayPort. As such, there was a much longer period of time where standalone desktop speakers running off 3.5mm jacks were the norm (as these were also the only outputs on the majority of PCs).
- Last but not least: surround sound is almost nonexistent in the PC space. Sure, it does exist, but >99% of users only ever have stereo outputs connected to their PCs. As such, most PCs lack the hardware to live-encode compressed surround sound (which is also mostly proprietary formats requiring yet another license fee). Thus using a well established and widely available AV standard for this instead makes complete sense.
Also: No, HDMI is not "for video". It is for audio and video. Or do you believe the vast majority of TVs are silent? Yeah, no, that's not how this works. Most TVs - and the game consoles, STBs and other equipment connected to them - use HDMI for both audio and video. With the advent of HDMI ARC, it has also now become the de facto standard for sending audio out to TV-connected stereo equipment (soundbars, receivers) though that is a slower trickle as most people use the speakers in their TV.
Edit: wow, I love that my previous post apparently warranted an "Angry" reaction. Care to expand on what exactly of what I said is cause for anger? You seem to have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning my friend.
