Surround Sound via PC?

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I have a PC with a sound card that supports surround sound, and a laptop which does not. Is it possible to run the audio from my laptop to my PC's soundcard, to my surround sound system?

edit; My laptop has USB, HDMI and lan LAN ports.

I'm guessing that your surround receiver takes in a digital signal, while the laptop outputs to a standard 3.5mm analog jack. You can probably run a standard audio cable from from the laptop to the Line In port on the sound card (nearly all sound cards have them). If the hardware supports it, it can convert the line-in signal to a digital signal and output it to the receiver.

On the other hand, if the receiver has analog input (and a lot of them do in the form of the RCA/phono jacks with red/white plugs), you can get an adapter cable from a place like Radio Shack (or whatever the equivalent is over there) to bypass the desktop PC completely.

what kind of laptop is it? if its a mac or a high end dell/alienware/toshiba etc, it will have optical out, which can be connected to a receiver.

running line out from ur lappy to the line in of ur tower box will only give u a stereo feed, unless ur somehow using a quadraphonic mux.
it may be possible to but a cheap USB sound card (firewire would be better, you can get a firewire adaptor slot card) that outputs a surround signal via coax, optical or multi-analog.

are you wanting stereo, or surround from the laptop?


EDIT: i don't mean to sound like an asshat, but the more data you supply about ur gear (make/model/etc), then we can give you more useful stuff back

It's fine, I probably didn't give enough information.



Surround ideally

My laptop is a cheap dell number, it has a SD slot, but no PC card slot for a sound card. I have a high quality sound card in my PC, which is why I wanted to output to it rather than an add on sound card.
My PC has the usual audio jack inputs, an optical port, and I also have a "TV input" and "Audio Input" on another card. They look a little like the old ports that were used for mice.

In short....no.

Surround sound requires special hardware. The inputs to your PC's sound card likely DO NOT allow for surround sound input, and if they did, your generic laptop does not have surround sound output. You likely only have standard dual channel (L/R) output.

Now, your laptop has USB. So, you have a shot of finding an external surround sound module/card that plugs in via USB. The HDMI may or may not work as a surround sound exporter, but then I'd expect your hardware on the laptop to support surround sound output already (which I suppose your manual would tell you). You can google the specs on your laptop's sound card to find out what it's capable of.

He can use something Called ProLogic and ProLogic II which goes through the L/R channels there is plugins for it for WinAmp haven't tested yet. It is not as good as Digital or DTS but still surround sound.


I guess I am lucky with surround sound
My Laptop has a feature for Fiberoptic sound and Analog Surroung front/surround/center

If your computers are lan together and you are asking just because you don't want to copy the files to your desktop, you can stream the audio over the network. Most media players support it nowadays.

If you want to hear the audio on the desktop no matter what program is playing on your laptop, you need a virtual sound card that can stream over ethernet. There are such programs but all of them are expensive.