Realtek ALC850 8-channel CODEC

[pcs800]

I have an ASUS A8n32-sli-deluxe motherboard with Realtek ALC850 8-channel CODEC audio, I just hooked up a 5.1 speaker system which sounds fine when playing mp3's, dvd's, etc. But sound from the web is only using the front two speakers, no sub.
I set up the sound device from control panel for 5.1, and the test works fine.
What could be the issue here?

 

[stormy13]

Perfectly normal as stuff online will only be in stereo (if it isn't mono). For things like Youtube if you want 5.1, you need to enable the speaker fill option on the Windows or Realtek control panel.

 

[pcs800]

Yes I understand there won't be surround, but there's no sub woofer at all, shouldn't there be?

 

[pcs800]

Ok, upon further investigation I see I was mistaken. Not verything sounds ok accept web browser, etc. The ONLY thing that sounds ok is my default media player which is Jet Audio, and this is because it has an option for multi channel output. If I deselect that, it sounds crappy like everything else.
I can play an mp3 through jet audio and it sounds great, play the same file through WMP and it sounds terrible.
Multi channel output option somewhere in the realtek driver???

 

[stormy13]

You have the latest driver for it installed? Looks like Realtek may have dropped support for the older AC'97 based coedcs, but the one they have avaiable here,

Realtek

is somewhat newer than the last Vista driver that Asus has available for it (but 2 years or so).

Ok, upon further investigation I see I was mistaken. Not verything sounds ok accept web browser, etc. The ONLY thing that sounds ok is my default media player which is Jet Audio, and this is because it has an option for multi channel output. If I deselect that, it sounds crappy like everything else.

The bolded bit was my impression with the last motherboard I had that had Realtek sound (little brother to yours, the A8N-SLI SE with the exact same ALC850 on it), and it didn't really matter what I tried with it it sounded awful. It was so bad that games like BF2 were unplayable due to the poor sound quality and very poor 3D audio (had an Audigy 4 at the time but figured I would give the onboard a quick test when I got the motherboard, needless to say I haven't tried any onboard audio since). This was in both XP and Vista at the time.

 

[pcs800]

Thanks for hunting down that driver for me, much appreciated! It would probably do the trick but since my last post I disabled onboard sound and installed a cmi8736 pci card and got a windows 7 driver from their web site. Their little audio configuration tool fixed everything for me. I did download the driver you lonked to though for future use or one day when I am bored and want to try fixing the onboard sound.