A good friend and co-worker of mine, the extremely talented Hinge Inquirer Creative Director Chris Garperio, recently got himself a flat-screen HDTV, and is now obsessed with finding hi-res inputs to feed it. He eventually ended up connecting his MacBook to the Bravia, and was delighted with the visual results, but wryly told me that he wished the sound came with it. I told him it did! He rapped back that he didn’t mean the paltry mini-stereo analog output from the jack - he wanted the serious surround stuff.

I realized that it isn’t common knowledge, even among supposed die-hard Macheads, that the audio-out ports of recent Intel Macs like Macbooks, Macbook Pros (with the exception of the Air, I think; I can’t get it to work, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of the things they took out) and others are actually also Digital Audio-out ports as well - all you need is to tweak a setting and use the proper digital audio cable known among audiophiles as the Toslink cable, which is used to connect AV receivers to digital media players and monitors. With it, connect your Mac via the jack to your system. (Yes, it’s that same little earphone port you use to connect your iPod buds to - all you need is a different cable.)

Get yourself a commonly available Toslink cable (pictured above) and get a mini-Toslink adapter (easily found; Belkin sells one, for example) so you can connect the Mac to the monitor or the AV receiver. Then dive into your player application (in this case, DVD Player) and enable the digital output:

Voila! Your Macbook now outputs full digital surround, including DTS signal passthrough - just like your settop DVD player! Then combine your Mac and Home Theater System with the Apple Remote and XMBC (which we’ll talk about in an upcoming post), and you got yourself an honest-to-goodness Mac Media Center.