Audiotechnical conundrum

Well, yeah. Agreed. But then we are talking about something that starts with planing out the room to build the sound system into. Or at least mitigations for less than perfectly suited spaces.

@Rogue-agent I think the best surround for the money in gaming might be coming up with the PS5 and the only thing you’d need for that is a pair of solid headphones.

Yup, surround sound is not tied to a specific number of speakers anymore.

A problem with aux to rca. I tend to play csgo and I need the surround sound in my headphones so I use usb for that.

And the speakers and subwoofer only have 2 cables sticking out.

This audiotech is way harder than I thought, unlike buying ram.

I’ll read into it

You can run the amp->speakers and the headphones from the preamp. A “preamp/preamplifier” is just an amplifier with a relatively low power output, it’s enough to make good headphones and small speakers sound nice and loud, but for bigger speakers you need an “amp/amplifier”, it’s just terminology.

Yes, each speaker has two wires - channel+ground. Ground is the same for all speakers (cheap amps even use the common electrical ground as audio ground, not ideal but it works, higher end equipment has more separation).

So, right speaker gets R-channel + ground (2 wires), left speaker gets L-channel + ground (same ground as the right speaker), subwoofer gets L/R + ground.

For the subwoofer, the channels are usually mixed inside the amp and ran through a separate circuit. Often paired with a low pass filter so the sub only gets low frequencies, although again, cheap equipment can skip on that because the subwoofer isn’t able to reproduce higher frequencies anyway.

Car audio forums are helpful since people share actual wiring diagrams, Hifi forums were filled with brand snobs last time I checked :smiley:, but still a good resource.

You could of course buy everything premade, but that will cost you a lot more. Plus it’s a fun thing to learn, I used to build amps and speaker boxes from scratch myself a decade ago.

No.
A preamp is specifically a line level device that is between source and amplifier, hence the name “pre-amp” as in “before-amplifier”.
Some preamps have a headphone out, which always requires some form of amplification (be that a single powerful Op-Amp or a more involved circuit) on the inside of the device.

So I should use my Preamp with rca connected from my pc to it and then rca to the amplifier (above) for optimal sound. And then from my TV with hdmi to a soundbar and then to that?