(Help) Repurposing old home theather system to PC

[remunramu]

So a friend got old sony bdv e6100 home theater, the bluray is broken but the speakers are okay. I'm thinking of buying the speakers and repurpose them for my PC home theater.
From my understanding if I were to connect them with PC I have to wire them in 3.5mm jack to mobo, you can check my spec.
- Front R+L - green plug
- Rear R+L - black plug
- C+Sub - orange plug
Is it just as simple as this? Will windows automatically detected them to 5.1?

 

[Hyderz]

Not that straight forward I believe,

 

[remunramu]

Not that straight forward I believe,

The indicator plugs on mobo look so obvious so I thought i could just do it straight away. So what do I need? some audio decoder?

 

[HumourMe2]

Direct from the motherboard moves decoding to the motherboard sound chip and assumes that your speakers are powered (I think). That's something I didn't need to consider as I repurposed an old AVR system. PC specific speakers may be an alternative to consider. If I'd known about this at the beginning it is probably the route I would have chosen. I think you need (powered?) speakers and/or a DAC or a repurposed AVR. Possibly DACs can power unpowered speakers. Not sure that this is a thing I just know there are two types.

In order of quality I believe (and I could be completely wrong and it is subjective anyway) that HDMI>SPDIF>Motherboard Analogue.

However, HDMI has a slight GPU/Processor hit and depending on source, different behaviour with less software control in some cases (it might just be my setup). SPDIF supports fewer uncompressed formats but has less computational over head and I'm beginning to move towards considering this as a compromise, since getting a widescreen monitor and playing a CPU intensive game both of which taxed my PC. Motherboard analogue needs compatible speakers. Audiophiles might notice a different quality. I've not tried this.

I can only describe where I've got to by trial and error.

I ran a hdmi cable to an old AVR and set it up as a fake monitor. Displayport goes to the real monitor. I have configured the AVR fake monitor to be ignored by the mouse using 'Dual Monitor Tools' and have it positioned imaginary top right just in case that doesn't work.

In Windows sound manager you then need to configure the AVR device as 7/5.1 speakers, pretend they are full range. This should allow encoded sound (Dolby/DTS) supported by the device to go straight through for decoding (bitstream). If the format is not supported Windows will revert to PCM. Then when this is all working you get to go down the rabbit hole of potential pre-encoding to a preferred format.

 

[remunramu]

Direct from the motherboard moves decoding to the motherboard sound chip and assumes that your speakers are powered (I think). That's something I didn't need to consider as I repurposed an old AVR system. PC specific speakers may be an alternative to consider. If I'd known about this at the beginning it is probably the route I would have chosen. I think you need (powered?) speakers and/or a DAC or a repurposed AVR. Possibly DACs can power unpowered speakers. Not sure that this is a thing I just know there are two types.

In order of quality I believe (and I could be completely wrong and it is subjective anyway) that HDMI>SPDIF>Motherboard Analogue.

However, HDMI has a slight GPU/Processor hit and depending on source, different behaviour with less software control in some cases (it might just be my setup). SPDIF supports fewer uncompressed formats but has less computational over head and I'm beginning to move towards considering this as a compromise, since getting a widescreen monitor and playing a CPU intensive game both of which taxed my PC. Motherboard analogue needs compatible speakers. Audiophiles might notice a different quality. I've not tried this.

I can only describe where I've got to by trial and error.

I ran a hdmi cable to an old AVR and set it up as a fake monitor. Displayport goes to the real monitor. I have configured the AVR fake monitor to be ignored by the mouse using 'Dual Monitor Tools' and have it positioned imaginary top right just in case that doesn't work.

In Windows sound manager you then need to configure the AVR device as 7/5.1 speakers, pretend they are full range. This should allow encoded sound (Dolby/DTS) supported by the device to go straight through for decoding (bitstream). If the format is not supported Windows will revert to PCM. Then when this is all working you get to go down the rabbit hole of potential pre-encoding to a preferred format.

Im sorry i don't quite follow the later technical explanation but the speakers don't have external power cords, they simply powered by 2 wires plug that connect to the BDplayer, only the sub has power cord. After I converted the plug to 3.5mm jack I tested directly on my phone and it worked as it is. As for the 5.1 system, it just worked straight forward on PC. About quality I think they're satisfying enough to my ears for watching movies or gaming. Although my friend said the sounds was quite low not as loud as with original HDMI arc from BDplayer. Probably can fix it with software sound booster something like that.