SPDIF, Digital Out, and the Audigy Card

I <i>think</i> so. Never tried it myself, but I've heard other say that's all you need. Unfortuneatly, the only time you'll get the surround sound thing happening this way is when you listen to something with dolby surround. You'll still need the analog cables set up as well to get surround happening in games etc.

You won't get more than 2 speakers going with your receiver unless you're sending a signal to the that's in Dolby digital. The Audigy will only output Dolby streams when you use something that's dolby encoded (e.g. DVD). With sound in windows and directsound 3D, you will never get more than stereo. The reason for this is that your receiver uses 1 SPDIF Line for digital input. The Digital out on your audigy uses 3 lines. One for the front 2 speakers, one for the back 2, and one for the centre and sub. The Audigy will output the Dolby streams on the same line as the front 2 (stereo) speakers, that's what gets used by your reciever. When you select 5.1 digital out, the audigy splits the 6 channels over the 3 SPDIF outputs it has. So in theory, when you select this mode, you should still hear sound coming from your front 2 speakers.

Apparently the SB Live used to have a feature called LIVEsurround which was meant to encode DS3D to Prologic in real time. The new N-Force chipset is also supposed to do this. The Audigy does not, apparently. The only way you can use digital 5.1 out is when you get a set of Multimedia speaker's like Cambridge DTT3500's that specifically support Creative's 6 digital outputs.

You could try a 1/8" jack to stereo RCA converter, I've just read the the mono ones don't always pick up the correct line for the AC3 stream. That could explain also why your receiver picks up nothing when you choose digital 5.1 out.