A Different Surround Sound problem

A few days ago I had to replace my motherboard. The PCIe video card from the old system is a Radeon 4350 with HDMI (7.1 capable) which I consider to be better than the on-board Radeon 2100 in the new mobo (it's HDMI only supports 2-channel). I have the 2100 disabled in the device manager.

If i go to Control Panel/Sounds, all 6 channels test perfectly on the Radeon 4350! But then I go to MediaCenter settings and tell it I have a 5.1 audio and it accepts it, but when MediaCenter tests the speakers or plays back a show recorded in 5.1, all sound comes out of just the front L & R speakers attached to my HDMI-switching receiver.

I'm going to see if it makes any difference to disable the audio on both HDMI's and use the optical S/PDIF instead.

I should have added that besides disabling the on-board video/HDMI in device manager, I have tried with them enabled; disabled in the bios and just about any other combination possible.

New mobo is Asus M4A78L-M with 4gb DDR2

Did you set the bios for the correct audio settings?

roger2717 said:

A few days ago I had to replace my motherboard. The PCIe video card from the old system is a Radeon 4350 with HDMI (7.1 capable) which I consider to be better than the on-board Radeon 2100 in the new mobo (it's HDMI only supports 2-channel). I have the 2100 disabled in the device manager.

If i go to Control Panel/Sounds, all 6 channels test perfectly on the Radeon 4350! But then I go to MediaCenter settings and tell it I have a 5.1 audio and it accepts it, but when MediaCenter tests the speakers or plays back a show recorded in 5.1, all sound comes out of just the front L & R speakers attached to my HDMI-switching receiver.

I'm going to see if it makes any difference to disable the audio on both HDMI's and use the optical S/PDIF instead.

This might not help, but it seems worth a try...

Set your video as you want it... then reinstall your audio drivers afterward...

It might be a simple detection problem.

After stealing a Toslink cable from another piece of equipment and routing the HDMI straight from the pc to the tv and the optical from the pc to the receiver, I got MediaCenter to send the surround signals to the surround speakers instead of dumping everything to the front L & R.

As far as drivers, remember I said that everything was perfect from the test within Control Panel - it only screwed up in MediaCenter. I had a similar experience previously on Vista. My take is that MC can "see" the other HDMI which only has 2 channels even though I disabled it in device manager and control panel/sounds.