Some help on 5.1 surround sound

[Alluvian]

Okay, the intro is that my wife won a set of Logitech Z5300 speakers (6 set 5.1 surround) in a contest recently.  They showed up in the expected shape (box beaten to shit, what do they DO with these things?), but not visibly damaged.

The 'instructions' consist of 2 tiny pages of english that essentially say "plug in wires to pc, make sure you match the color code".  Well, that is real cute, but these things don't match any colors on my system.

I am looking to start with onboard sound and see how that works.  I have an Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard that comes with onboard Nvidia soundforce 5.1 soundcard.  Generally it has sounded very good in 2 speaker mode except that in some games it gets scratchy after an hour of play or so.  I upgraded drivers and am hoping it will go away.

ANYWAY, the motherboard sound connections are:
1 Line In Connector (light blue)
1 Line Out Connector (lime)
1 Microphone Connector ..: (pink)
1 S/PDIF out Connector (yellow)
1 Surround UR audio Connector (violet)
1 CNTR I LFE Connector (orange)

The only connector on the audio in a box package is a chord with three color coded (but otherwise unlabeled) mini jack connectors (like standard male headphone connector).

The colors here are Green, Black, Orange.

Online I found the following about the connectors on the speakers (squat in the box other than the stupid "connect the colors")

Green = ground - front right - front left
Black = ground - rear right - rear left
Orange = Rear center - ground - LFE - front center

Okay, so orange to orange.  Got that.  Green to Lime (green).  Got that.

What do I connect the black to?  The violet on the motherboard?  I don't have a clue what "S/PDIF out Connector" means or "Surround UR connector"

If anyone knows, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,
Alluvian

[Hanzii]

The obvious answer is RTFM, but I like you...

For a 4 or 6 speaker audio output, the line in (light blue) connects to other audio sources. The Line Out (lime) connects to the Left/right Front Speakers. The Mic (pink) connects to a microphone. The Surround L/R audio connector connects to the Left/Right Surround speakers. The Center/LFE connector connects to the Center speakers or Bass speakers.

If you lost it, you can download it here:
http://www.asus.com/support/download/selectftp.aspx?l1_id=1&l2_id=10&l3_id=23&m_id=1&f_name=e1292_a7n8x_deluxe.zip~zaqwedc

There's even a nice diagram. The SPDIF (which you won't be using) is left of the coloured connectors (with two USBs in between it seems). Right left of the SPDIF is the The Surround L/R audio connector and left of that is the Center/LFE connector.

Nice speakers... but not as good as their bigbrother the z680. I have the same onboard sound problems on my MSI board - I would upgrade, not with drivers but with a decent soundcard.

[Alluvian]

Thanks for the response Hanzii.  I spent my lunchhour searching in vain for my mobo manual.  Then at work I downloaded it on zip from the very same link you provided, but my stupid work system says it is a corrupted file.  Tried again, same result.  I thought the source was corrupt (or else I would ahve just mailed it home and read it there), but if you could read it obviously it is my work system.  Win2000 does not seem to like it for some reason.  At least not this system.  

The cut and paste in my post was what I could find online regarding them and now from reading your excerpt, I bet

1 Surround UR audio Connector (violet)

is a typist misreading of "Surround L/R Audio Connector".

Which makes it all self explanitory.  The darn "UR" is what threw me.  Must lay off the stupid pills.

Thanks again.

[Morfiend]

I think on my system the black plugs in for the digital audio or some such.

I am in no shape to give advise on PC audio though. I have like 7 cords comming from my speakers to my computer. Hell, I dont even know if I need more than 5 of them, but I plugged them in any way. Ha.

[Venkman]

I spent my lunchhour searching in vain for my mobo manual.  Then at work I downloaded it on zip from the very same link you provided, but my stupid work system says it is a corrupted file.  Tried again, same result.

Looks like you got the sound thing figured out, but I wanted to mention I had a similar issue with Win2k PDF files. It gave me what sounded like file corruption errors when it really was that I needed to update Acrobat Reader.

Having said that though, I just downloaded the 3.5mb mobo manual file to see if I got the same error you did and sure 'nuf, it's busted for me too. Maybe Hanzii's got the right inner chi :)