It's just that I am in the midst of sorting out all my own at the mo

Re-reading that, that might all be a bit OTT for the thread starter

So lets re-evaluate

You have a nice shiney new LCD TV, and you have a nice DVD player (tho you haven't provided me with the model number so I can't see what connectivity it has

You TV has the following;



Bizarrely tho, it has no audio out plugs on it Which is a bit of a bummer, as you will have to use the headphone out socket, which is gonna give you a not very great sound

But anyway....

As said in the first post I made, the easiest and cheapest way to do it is to buy an all in one package where you get all the speakers + sub ready to go. All you do is plug in your DVD players audio outputs (usually the 6 phono cables for the multi-channel sound (5.1) into the back of the sub, and then plug all the other speakers into the outputs on the sub.

But! This won't give you any scope for plugging anything else in. In this case, you want an AV amp.....

It then really depends on the spec of the amp and spec of the DVD player and other equipment you want to use as to how you plug it all in, but as a guide....

You plug the either 6 RCA (5.1) outputs from the DVD player to the 6 RCA inputs on the AV amp. This will now let your amp accept the 5.1 signal for surround sound. If your DVD player has a digital coaxial output (single phono plug, usually either orange or black) then you can use this to go into the AV amp INSTEAD of the 6 phono's. The AV amp will then do all the 5.1 decoding, and if both the DVD and amp support it, it will do DTS aswell. To get your TV to play through the amp (and not through it's own speakers) you need a lead with a headphone socket on one end, and a pair of phono's/RCA's (one red, one white) on the other, and plug these into one of the inputs on the amp. If you have a VCR (for example) you can take the audio outputs (pair of RCA's) from that and plug them into another input on the amp.

Then you need to connect speakers to the amp. usually you have 5 sets of binding post speaker output (or clip outputs) for your front pair, rear surrounds, and centre speaker. The sub is from a "pre-out" which is a single (mono) phono cable that needs to go into either another amp (that the sum is connected to, or to an active sub (as in a sub with it's own amplifier built in) The latter is the easiest option.

So now you have 5.1 speakers, a DVD player, a TV, and a VCR all hooked into an amp. You can connect more as you go along provided you have enough inputs.

Next thing to baffle you tho, will be : in the future do you require the ability to work with HDMI (high-def audio/video cable's - bit like scart, but 100x better : more suited to HD content (TV, DVD, PS3/Xbox, etc) and also carries sound (will do upto 8channels (7.1) of uncompressed audio). If so then bacnk on spending at least £1000 for an AV amp that can input and output HDMI (your TV has a DVI input, which means it can handle an HDMI-to-DVI converter cable for pictures, but not audio)

Getting confused? Good