How does a digital S/PDIF port work?

[Bram Steenbrink]

I was looking into a new mobo, and I noticed most mobo's these days have a S/PDIF port in stead of the grey 3.5mm audio jack. I have a 7.1 surround setup in my room that uses the green, orange, black and grey 3.5mm audio jacks. But I can not find any good mobo's with the 6 3.5mm jack ports. It is either 3 ports or 5 and a digital one. Can I just use a converting cable as the grey jack or does it not work like that at all?

[VVoltor]

No you can't use a simple cable as the SPDIF signal is digital and you would need some kind of DAC to convert it to analog.

 

However on many boards it works like this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/RNpCB.png

[Bram Steenbrink]

3 minutes ago, VVoltor said:

However on many boards it works like this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/RNpCB.png

I know, but most boards I find now look like this: 

[VVoltor]

6 minutes ago, Bram Steenbrink said:

I know, but most boards I find now look like this: 

They are out there, like the Asus Z170-DELUXE and probably others

[anothertom]

1 hour ago, Bram Steenbrink said:

I have a 7.1 surround setup in my room that uses the green, orange, black and grey 3.5mm audio jacks. But I can not find any good mobo's with the 6 3.5mm jack ports. It is either 3 ports or 5 and a digital one.

You don't need 6 jack's for 7.1 surround. This is because the signals are paired so that 5.1 only needs 3 jacks and 7.1 only needs 4. The colours are arbitrary (despite being mostly standard), you just need to make sure you have the correct outputs.

[Bram Steenbrink]

1 hour ago, anothertom said:

You don't need 6 jack's for 7.1 surround. This is because the signals are paired so that 5.1 only needs 3 jacks and 7.1 only needs 4. The colours are arbitrary (despite being mostly standard), you just need to make sure you have the correct outputs.

Ah, so you say I can set my blue output to be the grey one so to say?

[anothertom]

2 hours ago, Bram Steenbrink said:

Ah, so you say I can set my blue output to be the grey one so to say?

That depends on how many audio channels your motherboard supports. If your motherboard uses a Realtek codec the audio manager will tell you what the different outputs are assigned to, and you may be able to swap them round.

[Bram Steenbrink]

11 hours ago, anothertom said:

That depends on how many audio channels your motherboard supports. If your motherboard uses a Realtek codec the audio manager will tell you what the different outputs are assigned to, and you may be able to swap them round.

Oke, since I am looking for a new motherboard is there a way to see if this is possible on a certain motherboard?

[Organized]

If the motherboard is advertised to have 7.1 sound you will have no problems plugging your suround system to it. There will be an explanation in the manual which tells you which color holds the specific channels. But the combination of channels is always the same I guess (left/right - surround left/right - center/LFE - 7.1 left/right). The fifth jack is the microphone jack and - if the board has one - the sixth is a line-in which you don't really need If you don't have specific needs.