S/PDIF to my Panasonic SC-PT960 home theatre system?

[mace10]

I am running an Asus G71GX-A2 gaming laptop with Windows 7 64-bit. Recently, I have been doing a little experimenting with using my Samsung LN64A650 LCD television as a primary monitor.

I have the Panasonic sound system hooked directly into the back of the television via optical, so when I plugged an HDMI chord from my laptop to the TV and selected the corresponding source, I received both audio and video on the TV's end quite nicely.

..only problem was, the response time was quite lousy. Therefore, I decided to give VGA a try.

That made not only the response time perfect, but the picture looked better as well. HOWEVER... I had lost audio, because VGA does not transmit audio, apparently.

Is there a way to transmit the audio through HDMI while still transmitting the video through VGA? If not, then luckily my laptop has a S/PDIF output, so is there anything I can do with that in tandem with my sound system?

Possibly something having to do with the optical connection?

Any insight into this matter is very much appreciated. Thanks for your time.

 

[SNGX1275]

If you have an optical in on your stereo system and if your laptop's headphone jack is also an optical you can use a TOSLINK to Miniplug like this one: http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...d=1022902&p_id=1556&seq=1&format=1#largeimage

I know some (all?) Mac laptops have optical out in the same jack that regular headphones go to. I don't know if that is the case on the higher end PC notebooks. There may be another way if yours doesn't have optical out, but I've just never ran surround out of any of my computers except my Mac Mini, which does the optical I mentioned.