I have hooked up my computer to my a/v receiver and I get an annoying hum coming from the receiver/speakers. I've connected my Creative Audigy2 soundcard line-1 out port with a 1/8" stereo phone jack to an RCA cable, then a Y-splitter, to my Onkyo TX-DS595 tape ports. I get the hum even if I'm listening to another source (other than the PC/tape). Setting the PC audio out volume to any setting doesn't help. Any ideas?

Sounds like some sort of a ground hum problem maybe?

The sound card and/or your mother board does not have a SPDIF out port? This is what I use from my HTPC I just built, this allows my receiver to do all the decoding. Not sure about using the 1/8" jacks.

Definitely a ground loop issue, years ago when I would connect my PCs to the receiver with an analog connection the same thing would happen. I put the PC on a UPS and it seemed to break the ground loop and worked fine. If you did have a digital output you probably wouldn't have the issue (esp with optical interlink).

I am curious thou, whats teh Y cable doing in this senerio?

Thanks for the replies. It does appear to be a ground hum. My PC is on an UPS, so that isn't helping me as it did for Inane. My PC does have an SPDIF out port, but I have my Cambridge Soundworks PC 5.1 speakers connected to it. The Y cable is to split the single RCA cable to the receiver L/R speaker input.

Sounds like a 1:1 transformer is in order. We hams connect our computers to radios a lot and this is a very common problem.

-Brian n8wrl

I solved my problem and got rid of the hum (and the Y adapter) by buying a ground-loop isolator (aka 1:1 transformer) from RatShack. Now there's no hum at all. Thanks for all your help, folks.

This is why I wanted to hook my PC to my living room receiver: Music Genome Project.

Good deal.

Ya those music services are getting popular. I subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited and they have a similar system in place where I rate music and it trys to figure out what I might like. Works rather well and its really great as I never know what I want to listen to. Plus discovering new artists and such.