Crysis, Sound Questions

Hey folks,

So I just finished BioShock, and it had amazing sound positioning. In the sound controls, I set it to 5.1 and it was beautiful across my Auzentech X-plosion 7.1 as the sounds traveled all around me with great positioning. It was time to move on to my next game, Crysis. Crysis runs great on my machine. No complaints at all. But when I go into the sound controls, there really is nothing there to "control." It's just... volumes and a quality setting. But there's no other settings, like for speakers, headphones, EAX, etc, nothing is there except volume of music, dialog and effects and the quality setting. Is this how it is for everyone or am I lacking something here? Is it based on what it detects? Should there be other options?

I'm curious because I'm not impressed with the sound in Crysis. The effects sound good and everything sounds nice. But, the positioning of the sound doesn't sound good. It doesn't even seem to support positioning beyond stereo and even then, it's still blended and not great. Crysis would be such a much more engrossing game to get into if the sound was as impressive as the graphics.

Anyhow, looking for ideas. I have an Auzentech X-plosion 7.1 soundcard, Operating System: XP (32bit). I run dolby digital live since that's what it's all about. I don't care about EAX and other things. I just care about positioning and surround sound. I have the card and a surround sound system for this reason. Other games and DVDs are fantastic. But Crysis just doesn't seem to have good positioning. I'm wondering if it's a driver thing, or something else, that I need to attend to. Looking for help in this matter, or at least find out if Crysis is supposed to have good sound positioning.

Very best,

Yep, most of my games run at 5.1 on my HT Omega Striker.

However, if I want Crysis to run in 5.1 I have to fire up the Striker control center and send a test tone to one of the rear speakers BEFORE starting Crysis. Otherwise I just get 2 channel sound.

weird....