Need Help Finishing Rig/Sound System!

[MofiatcH]

Hi, I am in the process of building a new rig and I pretty much got everything figured out except the sound. I want to have a speaker setup where I only need 1 set of speakers for my PC, TV, PS3 and whatever else I need to hook up. Is my only option buying a home theater system and going that route or do I have other options. Also do you recomend 5.1 or 7.1, I am going to be doing a multutde of things such as pc gaming, console gaming, watching blueray movies hdtv broadcasts and so forth. Also do i need to get an expensive soundcard? I was reading the forum pages about spdif/passthrough and how a reciever could do all the decoding whether it be DD or DTS. Some of my possible choices were Asus Xonar, Azutech Prelude or Creative Xfi Fatility. I have heard alot of complaints about creative though, especially with vista which I plan to run ultimate 32bit. Also if I decide to go with a soundcard with an X-FI APU I beleive to get EAX 5.0 I will need to go analog out to allow the APU to encode/decode? that format.

Here is a list of the parts I am planning to run

Antec 900 case
Antec 850 Quadro Power Supply
Intel E6850 dual core
Evga 680i A1 revision mobo
Crucial Ballistix 2x1gb DDR2 1066
2x BFG 8800GTS OC2 640mb GPU-SLI
Western Digital Raptor X + 2 Storage HD
Microsoft Windows Ulitmate 32 bit
Dell 3007wfp-hc monitor


If any of you have audio experience I would much appreicate your feedback as I really don't know that much about sound/speaker systems

[soloz2]

if you want to have several things hooked up to the speakers you'll need to either go the route of a true receiver or possibly Logitech Z-5500

[MofiatcH]

i just took a look at the logitech z5500 and was wondering that if i hooked up for example a ps3 audio to my tv through hdmi and then from my tv to the z5500 through optical would i lose any sound quality and would the system also decode the dolby or dts?

[soloz2]

that would all depend on your tv, but I would venture to say probably not