First post, by foil_fresh
I'm looking for ideas on how to get the 7 retro PCs I have (lol) to get into my main PC's sound card over a single 3.5mm input.
Currently I've got my 4 most used PCs all hooked up to a cheap-ish KVM that is PS/2, VGA and 3.5mm audio input but it does create a fair bit of excess noise/interference. It's okay and not too extreme but in moments of silence it could be better. As for the other PCs I manually plug in the audio cables, which kinda means if I'm feeling lazy I'm not using that PC. I've looked into a few things on ebay in terms of 6-in-1 selectors and am quite suspicious of their build and output quality. That, and I want to have all 7 PCs ready to go at the flick of a switch/press of a button. Only 1 or 2 of my sound cards have digital audio output and my main PC that everything runs through does not have digital input so I'd rather just keep it on the analogue side of things. The KVM currently goes into the line-in of my main PC's sound card which I then have mixed into the output of my USB wireless headset. It does a pretty decent job.
So, what do you use? A standalone mixer? An audio selector? Just plug them into speakers one at a time? I'd like to see what solutions you mad men have come up with.
Cheers