You can do it but you’ll need an amp to power the passive speaker. Might be able to use the headphone out on your interface.

And software shenanigans to do what you want because nothing except films and even in that case will use the center channel, in the movies case you’ll be on 5.1 tracks so you need to downmix the remaining channels. And for music and random content either the center will play the same thing as the edifiers so effectively lose stereo or you do some custom upmix in software. If they play the same content you also need to time align all the speakers to not suffer huge cancellation issues.

All in all not recommended unless you wanna throw 10s of hours of messing with software at the problem for questionable gain

Oh I’m probably gonna do the kid thing soon. Dive into that. Otherwise I would’ve said I’ll await you over on this side of life

With jack i’ve even ventured down a path of doing some stuff in jack and room correction via Sonarworks / Dirac in a Windows VM running netjack…
it’s been a wild ride.

I’m not sure it’s worth it tbh.
I only made it responsible for 50 to 80Hz. Mains kick in at 80, and PB1000 takes over the right hand side at 50.
It has made the bass response more even across listening spaces in the room. And gave the right main more low end. But even passing through the same 50-80Hz window to PB1000 vs the cheap sub, and listening to music just through the individual subs, the PB1000 sounds much better even at just that small window

I only EQ’d this with RTA mode and didn’t capture THD.But for time alignment I record an 80HZ sample from each speaker and check how many samples I need to delay a speaker by so that the output from each is exactly on top of each other. Even just doing this I could see that the wave from the cheap sub is less of a perfect sine wave and also surprisingly not perfectly regular. Time aligning the first peak would align most but on some waves it still started to start early or finish early or late. So I would guess that if I can see major issues just looking at an 80HZ waveform, that the THD is quite high

Would need to know about where you are doing Digital to analogue conversion but in general unless you need a box that you can stream to from many platforms and it can’t be like a chromecast. If that’s not true then absolutely return this ASAP. The only thing that matters for your sound quality here is what is doing the digital to analogue conversion. It sounds like if your laptop is out via USB then you are actually plugging both the node and the laptop into an external DAC. Digital is digital, it’s the same 0s and 1s.

I’ve heard linn 360 for a few songs and those are the best I’ve heard but at the same time of being unforgettable. My adam a5x with svs pb1000, with room correction and absorption panels, is at least in some ways. Just unbeatable. That’s my honest opinion. But overall the linn were better but some qualities are not comparable between high end speakers