- In this video, we're gonna show you three different ways
to connect your computer to a set of studio monitors
or powered speakers.
It doesn't matter if your computer is a PC or Mac,
and it doesn't matter if you have a set of entry-level
or more professional grade powered studio monitors
for your home office or workstation, wherever you are,
this video will be the guy that you're looking for.
Now, if you are looking for pricing or specs
for anything that you see in this video,
we do have links down in the description below
where you can find the speakers, the stands, the cables,
everything that we talk about
from a variety of online retailers,
to make sure that you are getting the best price possible.
Now, before we show you how to connect
to these studio monitors,
I do just wanna say one note about cable length.
It is always surprising to me how much cable it takes
to connect things that are relatively close together.
The amount of times that I've tried to cheap out
and buy a six foot cable to run the various items on my desk
and come up a couple inches short, has been countless.
I do recommend if you're buying any of the cables
or adapters or solutions in this video,
that you go with a 10 foot version,
I think you will be more happy
and it will allow you to make cleaner cable runs
and you will always get to the speaker that's on your desk
with a 10 foot cable.
So the first way that are gonna show you,
is we're gonna pretend that this entry-level
studio monitor here is your studio monitor
that you have at your desk.
With entry-level studio monitors,
something like this is pretty common.
You'll have a pair of inputs, the left and right.
You'll typically have quarter-inch or RCA,
sometimes just RCA,
and then you'll have a pair of speaker wire
that you can connect to your second speaker.
It'll automatically take that right output of the speaker,
send it over the speaker wire to your right speaker,
and it'll keep the signal for the left side
on the left speaker here.
So with something like this,
the first way that we're gonna show you
is by taking the headphone jack output of your computer
and converting that to RCA.
So here you can see that,
we have a stereo headphone jack right here,
and it converts it to RCA.
Something like this would work really well
for an entry-level studio speaker,
like the one that I have here.
So, we can take the headphone jack
and plug it into our computer, PC or Mac,
anything with the headphone jack, this will work.
Then now the two that we have left,
the red always goes to the right side
and the black always goes to the left side.
Sometimes you might have white as the second one,
doesn't really matter,
red just always goes to the right side,
plug that in, then we can turn the studio monitor on.
Then we can hit play,
and turn up the volume from our computer.
(upbeat music)
And you can hear that that works well.
Now, this cable here,
if it was connected to your other pair,
it would just continue and take the right side
and then you'd have your stereo image.
Now, the second way that we're gonna show you
is for a more high-end studio speaker here,
if you have quarter-inch jacks on it,
you can use a cable like this one,
and this will take the headphone jack
out of your computer here,
and it will take it to a quarter-inch cable,
which is a little bit higher end of a jack than RCA cable,
and it will get it to your speaker,
so we're gonna plug this in now.
So, we'll plug that in the headphone jack.
Now, here is where most of these cables,
you can just tear them apart and split them,
so you'd run the red one to your right side
and the black one to your left side.
Here, we're just gonna connect one
for the simplicity of the video,
but you know that it does give you
the left and right jack with a cable like this,
you just run them to the respective speakers.
So I can plug the black one into this,
and then I can turn the volume up on my computer.
(upbeat music)
And you can hear that that's working.
So both of these solutions will work for you,
but I did tell you that there's a third solution.
The third solution is quite a step up in quality
for a variety of reasons,
we have another video that goes into the depth
of why it's worth the cost,
but the third way that you can use to connect
all of this together,
is by using a dedicated audio interface.
A dedicated audio interface is really common
with a home recording studio,
it gives you a microphone and instrument level inputs
so you can record guitar,
vocal mics or a variety of different instruments,
but more than that on the back,
you get a set of balanced outputs.
These balanced outputs do help give you
a more high quality sound,
they reject more noise than an unbalanced cable,
like what we've used in this.
The cables that we've used in the first two methods
are totally fine, but there is a small chance
in a live electrical environment,
somewhere where you have a lot of monitors,
power bars, power equipment, all that type of stuff,
you can get a little bit of electric interference
in the signal over these cables,
but by having a balanced audio cable,
like what comes out of an audio interface,
a purpose-built device like this,
will give you a little bit better quality
and more connectivity options.
So, to make a solution like this work,
you can just connect a USB cable to it.
We do have links and recommendations
on various audio interfaces,
if you're looking for something like that,
and then here you can use the balance quarter-inch jack,
this is a little bit different than the quarter inch jack
that we used here.
They both fit but this one is a little bit different,
we do have a video link down below
where we explain the difference,
but this is a little bit better in rejecting noise.
We can connect that and then we can connect the other end
to the same quarter-inch jack,
but now we're using a balanced quarter-inch cable.
Then we can turn up the volume on the computer,
and we get a volume control on the audio interface itself.
That's another big perk of going with something like this,
is that you do get a nice big volume knob for your monitor,
I use that so much
when I'm working with studio monitors like this.
So this thing is really helpful,
but it all depends on your budget.
Sometimes it's just easier to go with the cheap cable
like what I showed you in the first two methods,
and some people are building up a home studio
and they eventually want something like an audio interface
to drive all their high-end audio equipment,
that's when I would recommend that you spend the extra money
to get something like this.
So to sum it up,
you have three good options to connect your computer
to your studio monitors.
You can go from your headphone jack to the RCA inputs
on the back of your speaker.
You can go from the headphone jack
to the quarter-inch inputs on the back of your speaker,
or you can use a dedicated audio interface
that will give you some more high end options,
like you can use balanced audio cables,
you get a dedicated volume knob,
you get more connectivity like adding microphones
and instruments to your computer, much easier.
And this would really manage all the audio inputs
and outputs of your computer
if you're wanting to go for that high end option,
or if you're eventually building up
to something like a home studio,
so you can do podcasting, live streaming,
or high-end video conferencing,
you will need a device like this anyway,
so you can use this to manage your studio monitors for you.
If you have any questions about anything that you've seen
in this video,
please leave a comment down in the comments section below.
Again, if you are looking for pricing or specs,
we have a bunch of links down in the description below,
and if you wanna see more videos like this in the future,
please like, and subscribe.
Thank you for watching.
(upbeat music)