Greetings from a simple audio person with simple audio needs.

[Feanor]

Hey all. Pleased to meet you.

I am not an audiophile by any means. But this weekend I thought I'd splurge and get us a 5.1 Surround DVD speaker system thingie by Philips. $169.99 from Target. I'm sure it's a fine product.

After wrestling with my wires for the better part of Saturday, i sent them a little note. it read:

I own a Sharp LC 47SB57UT, and I just purchased your product. I don't know how to make the TV audio come out of the speakers I just purchased. A chat person pointed me to your website FAQ but the Sharp doesn't have a one-plug input that can be connected to the coaxial thingie.

Can you PLEASE check out the specs for my TV and see how they are connected? Also, will my Wii sound through the speakers as well?

They didn't respond before I discovered that there's no practical way to do this. I returned it.

Now, still in full flush of consumerism, I am back to square one. I guess I need a receiver and some speakers for the living room. It's a small living room, maybe 15 x 15. A cell really. But it sure would be nice to have a system that wasn't too expensive and could work within that scale.

Hey, brutha. Can you help me out?

Thanks

Hi, Porc,

I assume you have some sort of antenna, cable, or satellite input to your TV and you want to get the sound from your TV to the Philps or similiar home theatre-in-box (HTIB) unit.

One way is to take the audio signal out of the TV and run to the HBIT. OK, so the Sharp model you memtion above does have a digital audio output but this is an optical (vs. coax) connection, which is a problem if you HBIT has only a coax input. Alternatively your antenna/cable/satellite box might have a digital coax Output that you could connect to the HBIT's digital Input. (This connections would by-pass the TV itself.)

If you content with stereo from TV, (and most network TV is stereo, not 5.1), then the Sharp also has a pair of analog "Audio Out" connections, (Left+Right). I would be extremely surprised if your HTIB doesn't have corresponding pair of analog "Audio In" connections. Connect the TV's Audio Out to the HBIT's Audio In connectors with a pair of RCA cables, then made the appropriate Input selection on the HBIT to hear the TV sound. (You might have to make some settings on the TV so it sound to the analog Audio Outs.)