sound problem

ok normally my computer is hooked up via a headphone jack in the back to my speakers. it goes into the right one and then from the right one is a coax cable that goes to the left. if i open the volume control window thing, and switch the sound from the left speaker to the right or vise versa it works, as it should. i recently got a surround sound unit, and i wanted to hook up my computer to it. i bought a cable that has a male headphone end and a male rca audio end, and i plugged it in. i only get left audio, and minor center audio. whats the problem? is this just the nature of the cable to combine all the sound to the left audio port? is there anything i can do about this? software to get or anything?

 

i have determined that it is the headphone extension cable that gets rid of the right audio. if i plug it in as a bridge between my computer and the computer speakers, i have only left audio. this is true of both of the cords like this i own. are they both faulty? or do all headphone extension cords do this? any suggestions?

 

Do you have a 1/8 inch stereo headphone plug and cable going from the computer to a SINGLE RCA-type plug, or are there 2 RCA-type plugs at the other end? If single then that's why you're only getting 1 channel.

 

no theres two. no matter what i plug the headphone extension into or out of it drops the right audio.

 

It could be that the 1/8" end is not a stereo plug-in but a mono plug-in. It could also be a faulty splitter. I bought a splitter that was supposed to be a stereo splitter for the 1/8" speaker jack on the back of my PC (it would basically turn the single jack in to 2 jacks). It didn't work... only one of the jacks worked. I returned it, and the next one they gave me wasn't stereo! It was mono! I gave up and got my money back and built my own splitter using an old pair of stereo headphones, a wire stripper, and a soldering iron. I'm currently using it to run the audio from my home DVD player (after modifying it to RCA jacks).

 

yes youre right, it is mono, thank you very much. i guess ill have to go buy a stereo one.