Can't get 5.1 surround sound to work?

Question

Here's the basics. I plugged my 5.1 surround sound receiver into my SPDIF port on my laptop (which everybody claims supports 5.1). But when I go into my playback devices in windows 7 to set up the 5.1, there are two different options... To set up the surround sound, the sound has to go through the "Speakers / Headphones" playback device, but my SPDIF port uses the "Digital Audio" playback device, with no option that i can see to make it more than 2 channels. And of course sound can only go through one at a time, and both work just fine by themselves, just no surround sound. So how can I get the "Digital Audio" device to set up for surround sound? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Update:

Just thinking about this a little more, and putting it out here so somebody can tell me if i'm right or wrong. But i'm guessing the SPDIF port automatically sends out the signal in 5.1 sound. So it's the receivers job to interpret the signal. So if i'm not getting the surround sound that I want, it's on the receivers side, not the laptop.

Anonymous · Answer

Using Digital Out or SPDIF Audio
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00501081&lc=en&cc=uk

SPDIF is encoded  by the audio chipset on the pc and then sent to the coaxial or optical output.
The sound system it is sent to decodes the signal and sends each channel to each of the amps/speakers.

It seems the laptop audio drivers may only have the capability to do this for DVD sources. The driver for DVD's is better designed for decoding, The regular audio driver of the laptop may not have SPDIF decoding capability.

Laptop manufacturers would need to improve their audio drivers for SPDIF to work with more audio sources.

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Can't get 5.1 surround sound to work?

1 Answer