optical audio out and 5.1 surround (1 Viewer)

Hi, I wanted to get a ps3 or bluray and i noticed it has an optical audio out, is there any way i can connect the optical audio out to a convertor that will output to the 5 speakers? (the speakers are a plugin with speaker wire crimped in a +/- plug that originally went into my sony surround receiver that had center, left, right, sub, etc.

The "converter" is called a receiver.


The receiver does two things that MUST be done between the optical cable and the speakers:


- Since the optical cable carries a single, encoded, digital surround sound audio stream, the receiver has to decode the single audio stream into the 6 discrete channels of audio information (5 main speakers and the LFE, or subwoofer channel).


- It has to amplify the audio signal before it's sent out to each speaker.


Without these two steps, the optical cable and speaker wire (that go to the speakers) are essentially incompatible.