5.1 and 7.1 Sound card and speakers question.

[Deleted5094879User]

Okay so I'll be straight forward. I want to get the Sound Blaster Z which is a 5.1 sound card. and I have the Corsair 2100 headset which is a USB headset. This apparently bypasses the computer sound card and uses its own.

Is there a way to re/un bypass this to use the computers sound card?

If my sound card is 5.1 and headset is 7.1 or vise versa what happens?

[kalikka]

 

Okay so I'll be straight forward. I want to get the Sound Blaster Z which is a 5.1 sound card. and I have the Corsair 2100 headset which is a USB headset. This apparently bypasses the computer sound card and uses its own.

Is there a way to re/un bypass this to use the computers sound card?

If my sound card is 5.1 and headset is 7.1 or vise versa what happens?

 

The 2100 is a wireless headset. Thumb-rule is that if the headphones don't have a 3.5mm or 6.3mm plug, then the headphones can't be used with any soundcard except with the one which is integrated inside it.

Only headphones/speakers that can be directly plugged (with a physical cable) to the soundcard can use the soundcard. It's as simple as that.

[obobski]

Agreed - there's no good way to use a USB headset with a soundcard. There are some non-analog headphones and headsets that can be used with soundcards (Audio-Technica, for example, has a few models that have TOSlink connections), and many wireless setups can be used with soundcards if the base station can accept a digital or analog input (Sennheiser, Audio-Technica, Sony, Koss, and JVC all produce examples). But USB implies that the headset (or whatever) has its own audio interface - so it's basically including the same function as the Sound Blaster in the bundle.

 

Now, to your second question about 5.1 <-> 7.1, it generally would not be a problem. With a 7.1 output to 5.1 speakers, the 7.1 source should be able to be configured to have its rear surround channels disabled (e.g. Audigy 2 ZS (which is 7.1) plugged into 5.1 speakers), and with 5.1 source into 7.1 speakers/whatever you will either get nothing on the rear surround, or the speaker/headset/etc may have some sort of upmix feature that will put something on the rear surround channels (some Logitech and Creative 7.1 sets do this). A lot of the wireless headphones I've referenced will have various DSP features as well, because they're generally designed for home theater, so you'd probably just want to take the 5.1 Dolby Digital Live output from the Sound Blaster and then let the base station unit perform whatever processing for the specific headphones.

[VileTouch]

yeah, in short, you can sell the headphones on ebay or something