Surround sound not working anymore

[Thrymm]

Hi all, I have been having a problem with my sound set up as of late. I had bought the Creative Audigy Platinum EX, and the Inspire 5300 speakers. For a month they all worked fine, in games, mp3's etc. Now the past week only the 2 back channel speakers work and the sub woofer. The other speakers I can hear the "hiss" from, but nothing. The sound quality is still good, but im missing out on the front channels and center for true 5.1 sound....

I have gone into the windows settings and made sure 5.1 is shown, as well as creative's utility. The speaker test will light up the speaker being tested. With that it is only "back left", "back right". The other speakers light up, but no sound.

I have uninstalled, reinstalled the drivers. Disconnected the speakers and rearranged their positions in the subwoofer. The only thing I have not done is literally rip the card out of the box and pop it back in.

Could it be as simple as that? or something else? Any ideas or has this happened to anyone else? Thank you kindly.

 

[4Ryan6]

Some motherboards designate PCI slot 2 to work with other things like onboard RAID, try moving the soundcard as far from the video card as you can get, but before you do that test your speakers by individually plugging them in to known soundcard activity, like if the front is working and the rear not, try swapping the plugs around to see if you get rear response, through the front output jack on the soundcard, if that checks out try relocating the soundcard to a different PCI slot. Also make sure if you've recently added something new, that you don't have any IRQ conflicts.
Hope this helps some. Ryan

 

[Crashman]

Creative has driver problems, so it's got to be either that or the software settings. Anyway, their soundcards produce inferior sound quality and 3D positioning to my 2 year old Vortex2, so I don't even bother (though I did try the Live Platinum 5.1 once when I got a great deal on it, it sucked too).

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

 

[Rikky]

I have exactly the same problem as Thrymm. I tried everything, but nothing seems to work.
- I checked all the cables and boxes. They work fine.
- I reinstalled WinXP (even incl. SP1)
- I installed the original drivers from Creative, because
they worked fine on my system for 5 months.
- I tried all kind of driver updates from Creative, and
even from kX... no effect
- I put the card in another PCI slot (further away from
the AGP slot). Now the card gets IRQ 5 and that one is
not shared with others.
- It is not a hardware problem, because if I connect a stereo speaker set to all 3 different outputs on my Audigy
(green, black and yellow) I hear sound, so my conclusion is that the card itself is working fine.

But: In AudioHQ or in games or when playing music, I ALWAYS
only have sound through the rear boxes (left and
right).

If I can remember correctly, the problem started when I replaced my videocard (MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4400) because it was broke.
But I replaced it with an identical one (same type) and of course in the same AGP slot, so I cannot think of what problems this can cause to my 5.1 sound.
Please help me.... all hints are appreciated!

Rikky

(System configuration:
Epox EP-8K3A motherboard
AMD XP 2000 processor
512 MB PC2700 DDRRAM
Soundblaster Audigy Player
Creative Inspire 5300 5.1
WinXP + SP1