So I picked up an Audigy 2, got it hooked up to my receiver .. Originally my Denon's DD5.1 would never come on. Finally I figured out that my Radeon installed some retarded software AC3 decoder that was screwing things up. After I installed AC3Filter as my primary decoder and set it to SPDIF passthrough, I can get a proper 5.1 signal from DVD's and a couple VOB demos.

However, I grabbed some of Microsoft's WMP9 5.1 demo videos, and none of then turn on the 5.1 light on my receiver and it sounds likere's no discrete left/right in the rear channel (sounds like pro logic or something). Has anyone run into this before? My WinXP sound config is set to 5.1 speakers, my audigy is set to SPDIF passthrough, in speaker settings it's set to 5.1 speakers. Did I mention it's RIDICULOUS how many places there are to configure sound and speaker settings? It appears that this is both Windows and Creative's fault -- gotta be one of the worst sets of UI's I've ever seen ... There are just tons of layers of dialogs and they ALL have slightly different settings.

Any help would be greatly appreciated ...

ms

The only sound chip I am aware of that does 5.1 digital encoding is the NForce based sound, and that only can be obtained via motherboards with the newer NForce chipsets.

Now, here is why this matters. The WMP9 5.1 signal is not typicially Dolby Digital, or DTS. Thus, it would then be up to the soundcard to turn this into a digital stream to feed to your receiver.

I was rather disappointed with the HD version of Terminator 2 that came on the DVD due to this. I tried playing it on my Shuttle, and found the same problem using the SPDIF out. Hooking up 5.1 via analog cables gave me the "surround sound" they put into it. AKA, all the speech was on the center channel only, and effects from time to time played from your other 4 speakers.

So let me see if I understand what you're saying -- for things that are already encoded in DD or DTS, SPDIF passthrough works properly, since it's just forwarding the signal, but for something that supports multispeaker but isn't actually DD, your soundcard would have to be able to convert it from its proprietary stream into a DD stream and send it over SPDIF? Wow .. That is /really/ misleading on Creative's part if that's true ...