Finally about ready. New Comp.

[MfA]

I tried to find that out & it just says 7.1 Channel, Azalia (HDA) on the EVGA site.

What motherboard do you have?

 

[D3v0ur3r]

What motherboard do you have?

This one. http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=122-CK-NF68-T1&family=Motherboard Family


I am getting a Realtek driver now & am going to try it when its done.

 

[BRiT]

I've been doing some reading on this, and it seems to be something a lot of people are trying to do but not finding anything straight forward. From what I gather in this thread, the 5.1/DD/DTS is used in movies but it takes a bit more to get it going in Games.

Not quite. If your mobo has an spdif out (optical or coaxial), it can and will output DD or DTS from it. Because the digital signal is not being encoded by the PC, it's already encoded on the disc you're playing. Therefore all your mobo is doing is sending the (pre-encoded) signal down the spdif. All you need is software like PowerDVD that can output using spdif.

VLC, SMPlayer, FFDshow and others will all output DD or DTS through spdif but need more fiddling with to do it than PowerDVD.
~~~
I was mostly referring to non-DVD sources. You can play pretty much anything over a digital connection (2 channel, 2.1, 3, 4, 4.1, 5, 5.1, 6, 6.1, 7, 7.1, etc)- that's not the issue. The issue is Sowk wants to playback everything in Dolby Digital 5.1. You can do this if your sound card supports Dolby Digital Live encoding, if it does not, then the only time you'll get the Dolb Digital surround sound is when playing a DVD pre-encoded with it. Your games and music would never play back in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. Hope that makes sense.

 

[D3v0ur3r]

Well I got realtek drivers installed but still forced to 2 channels. Guess I have to buy some regular comp speakers later. Thanks for all the help guys.

 

[D3v0ur3r]

If you're using creative drivers, DDL doesn't work. Only Auzentech's version of the X-Fi is fully functional. It's shit like this that makes people recommend not getting a creative sound card.

But you can bit stream out on the X-FI card. So it should be pretty good if you have a speaker setup or surround sound system that can process DDL & dts.

Only reason I bring this up now is because I had to RMA the MSI board & NewEgg was kind enough to inform me that this board was a "Replace only" purchase. So I will now be getting another MSI board with the X-FI, so I might as well use the X-FI since I'll have it.