I got the Logitech Z-5500 digital 5.1 speaker set to go with my new laptop. Sounds great, there’s just one problem: not a single game I have supports surround sound over the digital output. Every one of them just dumps out 2 channel.
Has 3d options in game settings, but they have no effect, continuing to output as 2 channel:
Civilization IV - Beyond The Sword
Company of Heroes
Neverwinter Nights II (with Mask of the Betrayer expansion)
Portal
Is this just an unlucky set of games? Something with Vista? Something with my configuration?
The speakers support the center, rear, and left plugs for analog positional audio, but of course the laptop doesn’t have output plugs for that, even though the RealTek ALC883 chipset supports it.
The internet searching reveals the mysteries! Turns out no games support encoding digital positional audio on the fly; everyone assumes you have analog output.
What was confusing me is that it didn’t look like the laptop would support positional analog output, as it only had a single output jack, the headphones. Turns out that at least on Sager 9261 you get multi-channel output by dual-using the line-in and microphone jacks. When you plug something in to them, it pops up a prompt asking what you want to use it for. So you plug the front channel into the headphone slot, the rear into microphone, center into line out, answer the popups, and boom, all set.
Shit, that sucks. I always wondered why I didn’t get the digital output from my PC. That’s WRONG, man. I assume you have a the coaxial/RCA digital out, and not optical out, right?
I used to the use direct analog out (I think it was green, orange, and black, if I remember right) but then I switched to digital.
Get with the program, PC gaming! That’s really rotten.
Right. Games don’t come with 5.1 dolby digital encoders in their software. All you can use the digital out for is to transmit the pre-encoded digital audio stream off of your DVD movies to your receiver, which then decodes it into analog.
Some laptops use their audio jacks for dual purp… nm, you figured it out.
Right. Games don’t come with 5.1 dolby digital encoders in their software. All you can use the digital out for is to transmit the pre-encoded digital audio stream off of your DVD movies to your receiver, which then decodes it into analog.
Some laptops use their audio jacks for dual purp… nm, you figured it out.
Since you have a laptop I think you are pretty much boned for DD5.1 sound from a digital (spdif/coax) port. Cards like the X-plosion can re encode 6 channels into a DD5.1 signal in real time, but I only know of pci versions. Creative is of course too cheap to include the feature in their sound card lineup.
Yeah, it doesn’t sound that hard to take the 6 still-digital channels and just stuffing them into Dolby or DTS, rather than going to all the trouble to analog convert. What do I know though.
