I know people who do this (mainly when you mostly listen to stereo music, and only watch movies occassionaly) and it sounds great. The output of the mixer is then connected to the power amp, which will drive your front speakers.Īs a bonus, the power amp will probably be a better quality than the integrated amp in the reciever, and SQ may be improved. Then, you connect the main L/R preouts of the reciever to one of the input channels of the mixer (either a stereo channel or appropiately panned mono channels), and the two computers (soundcard analog out or DAC out) to the remaining channels on the mixer.

Basically, you connect the centre and rear speakers, your consoles (the only thing that actually needs 5.1), and the cable box to the reciever using HDMI or SPDIF connections. You're going to need an AV reciever, a simple mixer, and a seperate power amp. I'm assuming that you want to listen to music from the computer(s) while you're gaming, and not mixing it another way. If you want to have 5.1, it's going to be messy.

Headphone mixer multiple inputs