Surround Sound
 

I have an Audio Excel AV512 sound card. With windows 2000. My front speakers work but my rear,center and sub do not. I have updated the drivers and after I did that when I go into my menu and switch to either 4 or 5.1 speakers I hear sound from them for a half second then again nothing. Any ideas? Now before I reloaded windows 2000 (had windows 2000 before as well) my center and sub works sometimes but not all the time. My rear have never worked and I have tested the speakers and they work fine. Its with the sound card and I suspect its most likely some setting I have missed somewhere. Any thoughts?

just to check the obvious, but are you listening to a 5.1 channel source? (dvd audio, etc) or a stereo one?

I have checked several sources. With winamp (which I assume is just stereo) before I reinstalled windows my center and sub worked. Now they don't even with that. And with the demo thats supposed to demo the surround as well as in games with surround I still get nothing.

Make sure the speakers volumes are not on low or mute. With my turtle beach I can control the volume of each speaker independently.

Check your faders, make sure everything's plugged in correctly, and make sure you have the latest drivers

I have check all the volume controls ( I think! Which is to say I have checked the ones on the front of the speaker as well as the ones on the mixer thing that came with my sound card... is there any others that I do not know about) I have checked the plug ins mutiple times (that actully WAS a problem at first but fixed it) and I did not have the latest drivers but then I got them but to no avail.

there's probably something in the control panel or driver program to up-mix 2 channel sources to 5.1

hum, have you set that you want 5.1 speakers both in the control panel under sound and also through the controlapp for your soundcard? On some systems you need to change that in two places.

I actully discovered that last night and it WAS set to two speakers in control panel. I have now set it yo 5.1 but to no avail. :( I just have horrible luck I guess.

You might need to change it to 4-speaker or quadraphonic set up. I too have a 5.1 set-up but only get sound out of the rear speakers when it is set ot a 4-speaker set up. But this way everything seems to work.