Modern portable personal computers act not only as devices for browsing websites, playing games, and doing office work. By connecting a home theater to them, you can turn your laptop into a media center: watch movies, stream videos from YouTube on the big screen, play online games, play audio and video files. If the switching is incorrect, even expensive equipment can break down and need repair. To prevent this from happening, you need to know how to connect the device to your home theater.
Types of connectors
Before connecting, you need to decide which ports are on the two devices. This is done in order to select the desired wire to connect the speaker system and laptop PC.
- HDMI is a connector that looks similar to a USB port, but is longer and thinner. Transmits video and audio data in one cable. Provides a digital signal with minimal setup effort.
- VGA resembles a rectangle with rounded corners. The connector consists of 15 contacts (5 contacts in 3 rows), provides transmission of an analog video signal. To transmit sound, an additional cable is required to connect the headphone jack to the speakers or cinema system.
- RCA. Sometimes you can find a composite video connector (usually yellow) in laptops. To transmit an audio signal, use the headphone jack via “Mini-Jack” - “RCA”.
Equipment instructions for a cinema system in tandem with a laptop
Designing home theaters with any portable computerized device consists of a few simple steps, following the rules of which you can easily provide yourself with excellent high-quality sound of any video or audio file.
The main stages in the installation work to connect a home theater to a laptop are:
- A standard home theater kit contains a disc player, speakers, an audio card and a special cable with tulip and mini-jack connectors, as well as a subwoofer necessary for high-quality sound.
- Connect the special wire from the kit with the “mini-jack” side to the audio card of the PC device in the socket marked out, and with the “tulip” side to the player itself. Thus, you connect both devices to each other and ensure their functioning in tandem.
- Thanks to the DVD player included in the kit, you connect the cinema speaker system and the audio card of your computer or laptop. After the above step, connect the player to the network and select the required audio output channel in the settings. This completes the work on this part of the cinema.
- The acoustic system in the form of speakers and a subwoofer is connected using cables, the connectors of which have corresponding holes in the player. In the settings of the sound card in the acoustic equipment, you can find the necessary parameters and thereby ensure powerful and high-quality playback sound.
Ways to connect a home theater to a laptop
Whether you have a laptop or a computer, it doesn’t matter. But for clarity, we will present a laptop.
the VGA and HDMI connector cords in your home . RCA is not found on modern laptops; they have been replaced by a headphone slot and USB. It is impossible to connect a home theater to a laptop via USB 2.0 (and its other versions: 3.0, 3.1), since the cable provides information through only one channel format (for video transmission you need two: sound and “picture”). And what’s more, shorting the channels can lead to damage to the laptop and the cinema!
Now let’s look at the slots through which two channel formats can be routed:
- HDMI
Slightly similar to USB, only 2 of its corners are not straight. This is the most modern cable that allows you to carry sound and picture simultaneously. Its price is a little higher than the others. And in general, it is already replacing the outdated VGA or even “tulips”. Cable TV, Play Stasion, XBox and modern video cards use only HDMI.
- VGA
This is a large cable, painted blue. It has many communication threads, so finding a connector for it is not difficult. If you only have a VGA, you will need to additionally connect a sound reformer to speakers, since the cable is connected to the theater via a video card.
Now select one of the cables to connect ( only one! If there are two, a short circuit will occur) to the cinema and find where to put the laptop so that you can control it, and the cables reach both devices.
“Chinese box” or full-fledged receiver?
In fact, the choice is ambiguous. If you need to connect several devices into a single system, the choice is obvious.
However, buying a receiver will hit the budget hard, and if there is no need to scale the entertainment system, it will become an unjustified waste. The box copes with the tasks quite well if it is necessary to connect acoustics and a single sound source.
So why pay more?
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