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#1
Realtek HD Audio/Creative Xtreme Soundcard No rear speakers.
To start, Hi, I am a first time poster to sevenforums, and registered here because of the wealth of information threaded out over the years. Well done to all. Right now down to the serious :). I, as many others have experienced the sadness of upgrading to Windows 7, only to find that my 5.1 rear surround sound speakers do not work. I have
- Checked conectivity of rear speakers
- replugged to let HD Audio acknowledge and give options to what speakers are involved.
- swapped plugs to different colour ports
- changed from 5.1 to 7.1 and diddled the side speakers settings.
- changed volume levels as per speaker
- reconfigured registry
- UPDATED the Realtek Audio drivers and Creative xtreme (when soundcard inserted) drivers as of Sept
2014.
......... the list of to do's is tasking so will stop at none of the suggestions either worked or there was 98% front speaker sound 2% rear sound available. The apparent behaviour that I experienced is 2.1 channels even though 5.1 da dah da dah has been inputed, reinserted and reconfigured into either the Realtek onboard Sound Manager or the Creative Xtreme soundcard Audio Manager (when the card is inserted).
I am a very experienced systems builder by profession, but was gobb smacked by this little gem.
1. Why does Surround Sound 5.1 Speakers (Logitech) work with XP with onboard Audio and with Soundcard straight out of the gates.
2. Why does the sound test from Windows 7 sound off all the channels correctly and yet when playing music or videos does it revert to 2.1 (when same songs and videos on xp audio were surround).
3. Why does it appear that Realtek and Creative are aware of the problem, and even though there are updates it still persists.
Gob smacked yes, so I tested my system hardware and speaker setup and decided to Dual Boot the system with Windows 7 and XP on it. The result being that my surround sound was back with XP, dead with W7. It relieved me no end that I was not going crazy and that the Windows 7 audio is screwed somewhere, so I conferred with collegues and we are going to test a theory that it may be the CPU/make of the board that is :-
a. My system is AMD oriented with Realtek Audio Manager.
b. we will test (this weekend) with a Intel equivalent (exact spec version) with VIA Audio Manager.
Please if someone has an Intel motherboard with Via Audio and have had this problem with the rear speakers, please let me know, else will continue with the testing.
Last edited by MForrester16; 03 Oct 2014 at 04:37.