5.1 surround sound being a pain!!

[CoolFunkMan]

I'm currently using a Creative Audigy 2 on a Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4 motherboard, my operating system is Windows XP. I've been having a lot of trouble with it recently, with only the front left and right speakers working.

 

Bassicaly, the onboard sound was clashing with the Creative soundcard. I kept getting a "New Hardware Found" message because of it. I read somewhere that it was best to disable it via 'Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager'. So I went there and disabled the 'Audio Device on High Definition Audio Bus' and 'SM Bus controller'. Both were not recognised in the device manager (were marked with a ?). I installed the latest Creative drivers and I keep getting issues with the software.

 

When using the creative sound software, I can only get into the Audio Console and the Sound Mixer, trying to get into anything else, such as the EAX console, results in an error telling me that "the application has had to be closed". When I go into 'Control Panel > Sound and Audio Devices > Speaker Volume', I keep finding that channels Left and Right are the only ones that react to volume change. Channels 3-7 sliders are set to off, and channel 8 is at full (why it says 8 channels, I don't know.) I can click on "Restore Defaults", which puts the sliders back to normal, but it resets them back to off as soon as I exit it.

 

Oh, and this is all after uninstalling and reinstalling my drivers btw.

 

Sorry for such a long post, this is just such an annoying problem. If anyone can help, then thanks in advance...

[Choze]

check your plugs for the speakers. Make sure they are in the right places. Also make sure oyu have installed the right drivers.

 

Yes Creative are rubbish.

[RoadKill]

When your PC is booting up, hammer delete or whatever it shows to access the BIOS. You will be able to disable the onboard sound here completely so windows doesn't even see it, it's probably under "Integrated Devices" or something similar. Onboard sound may be listed as AC 97 CODEC or some shit, just set it to disabled and save and exit.

 

For the record, Creative drivers suck total balls anyway.

[CoolFunkMan]

Sorry for the late reply, I've been busy recently.

 

I did as you said, it was listed as some kind of codec in the bios. I now have sound from all speakers, and I can finally listen to mp3's in surround sound again. Thanks for the help. ^^