Windows 7 and 7.1 Surround

Hey everyone,

I installed windows 7 today, I'm a big fan of hooking up my comp to the TV and watching movies. It was a pain to get the video card working but all is good now. When i thought I was ready to start watching some quality TV, I came across an even bigger problem: Only 2 of my speakers were working, i went to the hardware and sound configs in the control panel and set it to 7.1 surround, sure enough it recognizes all of them, when i test it all 7 speakers and the subwoffer work perfectly, however no other program is using them, they all only use 2 speakers .

I've tried winamp, vlc, windows media center, media player classic and it happens with all of them.

Help!

Thanks

Most likely because those programs you're using, or the media you're playing isn't anything more then stereo. If you want 7.1 you have to play media that supports 7.1 surround.

OR if you're using a Creative Card, most of them have a feature that allows fake surround sound. Even if the media is not.

having the same problem. when tested each speaker works yet when listening to audio or watching videos the computer only uses 2. had full use of all speakers in xp and vista

anyone found a fix or a workround?

I had the same issue with my 5.1 system in Windows 7. Only 2 speakers would work when using Media Player or playing games. It worked fine in XP. When testing the individual speakers, they worked fine.

What I did to fix this was go into the 'Manage Audio Devices'. My default device was '2 High Definition Audio Device', just a bog standard one on the Motherboard.
I entered the properties of that device and went to the 'Enhancements' tab.
There was an option there called 'Speaker Fill'. The description of which was "Speaker Fill creates a virtual environment for playback of stereo audio sources on surround speaker systems"

Selecting that option fixed the issue for me. It doesn't sound brilliant in all applications, but it's a good step forward.