Optical output on ht omega 7.1 striker card not working

ht omega striker 7.1 sound card
running optical out and into my amplifier, have tested the amplifier input, and the optical cable. tried the drivers from manufacturers website, a couple sets of vista drivers, no drivers, and tried switching the default optical out back and forth with different drivers in the windows 7 "manage audio devices" screen.

on that screen it shows a sound bar going up and down, as if the pc thinks it is sending sound out of that outpu,. but nothing. double checked the optical line is coming out of the output on the back of the card, checked volume...out of ideas!

anyone else have this issue? not sure if the drivers are not working properly or just need to try some different vista drivers and squeeze sound out until the windows 7 drivers are working properly... help!

(should mention this exact setup worked fine 2 days ago, until i installed windows 7)

I have a 7.1 card. Did you install the Windows 7 drivers on the HT Omega site? If not, that is the first step.

I notice there is a "Digital Out" option in the Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Sound Panel. Set the Digital Out as the Default Playback device. That should give you the S/PDIF output.

yeah as i said, already downloaded the drivers direct from the site, and also assigned the default playback. tried other drivers, restarting... nothing seems to work!

Two additional things to try - (1) Uninstall the Striker in the Device Manager then restart the PC and when Windows starts it will detect and reinstall it. If that doesn't fix it, (2) reseat the card (obviously with the PC Powered off).

To access the Device Manager, hold the Windows key down and press the Pause/Break Key. Device Manager can be accessed in the upper left of the Panel that comes up. In the Device Manager, RIGHT click on the Striker 7.1 and then LEFT Click on "Uninstall" (DO NOT uninstall the drivers). Restart the PC.

You can try contacting HT Omega. Their tech support is pretty good about responding and working with customers problems.

Actually I did email HT Omega. And they wee most helpful!

I was a bit of an idiot, and had no discovered the zip file I d/l from there site contained software that was accessible only in the systray. I checked for software elsewhere, and assumed the file I downloaded was simply the drivers, and that my windows sound management would suffice.

Oddly enough, the default playback needed to bee set as "hto speakers" in the windows sound management, and not the s/pdif out. That seemed odd to me.It also needed to be set to dolby digital live output on the HTO software. Which also seemed somewhat odd. Anyways it worked, thanks for the input guys.

Thanks for info on the S/PDIF output. I just checked my Striker 7.1 panel and saw the option to enable the S/PDIF output. I've never used that, as my recording studio interface has the optical I/O and that is what I used.