The easy way: Line-out

Life

It’s just not possible to have too much music. But what good are all those tunes when you can’t find them or play them quickly? That’s the question one often ponders over when you stare at your living-room CD rack and 5-disc changer. Maybe you have already got most of your music ripped to MP3s but you still prefer full CD-quality music when you can get it, but it sure would be nice to take advantage of all those stored tunes – and the instant access you have to them on your PC or portable player – to listen to a track here and there. Using the line-out is the best way to get digital audio files to your stereo.

The easy way: Line-out

When in doubt, run a cable. That’s usually the cheapest solution to most computing problems that involve moving data from one place to another. Running a long audio cable from your sound card to your home stereo is certainly a possibility.

In most cases, you’ll need either a digital audio cable (many sound cards offer a co-axial digital output that most modern receivers can accept) or a 1/8-inch stereo-to-stereo RCA cable that adapts the analogue outputs on your sound card to the standard size of your receiver’s inputs. You wouldn’t spend too much money on a super-high-quality cable, though, as you’re already dealing with compressed audio files.

But unless your PC and your stereo are in adjoining rooms, running a cable won’t be the most convenient solution. If you’ve got a portable MP3 player, it’s often easier to simply plug that into your stereo. The best way to do that is with a line-out jack that sends an unamplified signal to your receiver. That’s a critical distinction, because if your player offers a headphone output only, you should be prepared to spend a bunch of time playing with volume settings on both the player and the receiver to find levels that don’t distort the sound. Several portable players, such as iriver’s H340 feature both headphone and line-out jacks.

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