mac_nicrom

Actually, when i just leave the sound system turn on and switched to analog mode on either 5CH,2ch,Dobly 1/2 and when nothing is plugged into the gmx controller(the optical,coaxial, analog ports) the hiss is still there. it has to be the sound system itself that has the problem. one thing tho: in analog mode it wont let me into dobly digital, is that ok? or does that only work on digital opt/coax. thanks

I will try to explain this as simple as I can without getting lost. I bought a Klipsch GMX 5.1D sound system from the Apple Store a couple months ago. The speakers looked awesome hooked to the Powermac G5. So I brought one home to my PowerMac G4. The G4 only has a headphone jack and apple pro speaker port. At first I thought this was easy. Simple setup, and awesome sound. Well, both went wrong. I set up the speakers after reading the manual. I took the coaxial-to-headphone jack cable and plugged it into my headphone jack of my G4. I turned on the system, set it to Digital Coax and tried playing a song. Nothing happened, no sound. After reading I found out that coaxial is not compatible with my headphone jack. I bet your thinking I'm real stupid, but I really didn't know anything about optical, or coaxial or analog terminology at that time. So the manual said i needed to use analog with DDPLII. I took the cables, hooked it up to the mac, and it worked. Analog works. So now I knew my mac needed some kind of sound card to receive coaxial connections. That was the least of my worries though. In analog mode it says that there would be a hissing sound. At first I thought it was small, but it sounded loud! It was getting annoying. I thought it was my cables but I seemed to have plugged everything right. And ever since then I have been hearing this loud super-annoying hissing everytime my system is on. Though when I mute it via the remote, it's quiet. Just out of curiosity I switched to the digital coax mode on the remote with nothing plugged into the coaxial port. All of a sudden it was quiet. No hissing at all. I thought, if I get coaxial everything would be quiet. But i don't know if this is true. So my basic question is: If i get coaxial will my hissing go away completely when it is plugged in. Second: Is it normal for the Analog mode to have a loud annoying hissing sound? Are my speakers defective? And third: I have found a sound card with an SDPIF out port, will this sound card help me connect my mac and sound system via coaxial. http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/70103/wo/Df7LVBemKYnv2cgiXRM1zjjC6dj/2.3.0.5.10 Last question: Is coaxial better than analog, and is it better than optical? Thank you to anyone who responds to my dilemma. Gabe