Adapters for those 3.5mm speaker cables?

[Kaisha]

Here's my situation: My 5.1 surround-sound speaker set outputs to 3 3.5mm stereo cables (Center/Subwoofer, F.Left/F.Right, R.Left/R.Right), which is all fine and dandy for my main PC rig which has a sound card with all the appropriate inputs, but both my laptop and PS3 don't.

I'm pretty sure there are adapters I can hook the 3 cables into there that'll make them work with my laptop (probably via USB/Firewire for that), and something else for my PS3, but I've no idea what they're called exactly (or what brands to purchase). Anyone care to shed some light?

All I can say is, 2.1 sucks.

[Killgannon]

there isn't a converter like that sorry.

if the audio out on the device doesnt support 5.1 by default, no converter add on thing is gonna make it support 5.1, you could on the laptop buy a pc card sound card that supports 5.1, or a usb sound thing with it, but your ps3 is prolly fucked, or you need to get better 5.1 speakers with more inputs (like RCA, digital, or whatever) you can i think get 3.5mm to RCA converters.. goto cablesforless.com and look around for them (this will only help with ps3)

[mootsfox]

You got it backwards, outputs from the soundcard, inputs to the speakers. For the PS3 and stuff, you could try to run it to the line-in or mic input on your soundcard, and then run the speakers from the soundcard. You'd have the have the PC on though.

[Isiolia]

There's no great way to do it that I can think of. You could possibly run splitters so that you get sound out of more than two of the speakers, but that wouldn't be true 5.1.

Laptop, yeah, you could purchase an external sound device with 5.1 output. Such as http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6829102020

Personally, I wouldn't think it worth it, but up to you.

PS3...harder.

What you'd ideally want for that I'd say is a set of speakers that takes a digital input (probably optical if PS3, dunno that you can get a digital coax from it). Or you could probably use a reciever that has 5.1 channel pre-out and use that, but of course at that point you could just buy some real speakers too.