I was really excited when I found the Logitec Z506 Surround Sound System on sale on Ebay. It had the perfect sized sub woofer for a dorm room and the speakers were small enough to fit in any small nook or cranny. I ordered it immediately and awaited its arrival with bated breath.
It arrived in a small box in a week and I took it back to my room opened the box, spread the speakers out to all four corners of the room for the perfect surround sound experience plugged the power cable in, picked up the cord which has the jack on it to attach to my laptop and this is what I see.
Three jacks. Not one, not two but three jacks! What am I supposed to do? I check my laptop again and it only has one port for speakers. I try to think of a solution and I remember that I used to have a similar system before with the same three jacks. At that time I owned a desktop with a sound card that had multiple output ports specially configured to work with surround sound systems. My laptop has a sound card as well but unlike its desktop counterparts, it does not come with multiple ports. So I experimented with the three jacks and they all produced sound but none of them produced sound from all of the speakers. I settled with the black jack which produced sound from the sub woofer and two of the back speakers. I went online and found several solutions to this very problem. All the solutions narrow down the input to one jack.
All the solutions however cost more money. Money that I wasn't expecting I would need to pay to get my sound system up and running. I was extremely disappointed with the product description provided and hopefully future sound systems either work out the problem or at the very least list it in the product description.
I feel your pain. As someone who loves listening to music, and quite loudly at that, just reading about this sound system gets me excited. Also, I hate spending money and nothing annoys me more than hidden costs like the one associated with your purchase. With current technology use being mostly mobile (laptops/tablets) you would certainly expect a company like Logitec to realize this and provide the converter for you or make the jacks into one. I guess this is just a great example of why the design process is iterative. You have to adjust to the changing environment in order to satisfy your users.
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