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Z-5500 Rear Speakers Problem

S

sockhead

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 12, 2005
Messages
103
I've been running my z-5500s in 2.1 mode for quite a long while, and I finally decided to add my rear speakers to my setup. I plug in the speakers with the speaker cable to my subwoofer, and enable 5.1 in my windows control panel. I don't get any sound from the rears.

I then try the test option on the control unit, and when playing pink noise I still get no sound from my rear speakers. I do believe that all my speakers are hooked up correctly, am I missing something?
 
I tried reversing my rear and front inputs into my sound card, and when I plug the rear wire into the front input I still get no sound.
 
May be this will help.
I found it on this forum: http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/5/1656.html

I don't know if your using an Audigy card but here's the post:
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For those of you who have posted to this group, I hope this information will help you.

In reference to the original poster, to hook up a SB audigy card to an amplify using the digital output, you just need a cable with an RCA plug on one end, and an 1/8” (3.5mm) mono plug on the other. This cable is usually quit easy to find. You can buy them at dollar atores, audio shops, or can usually find adapters that convert an RCA plug to the 3.5mm jack. The cable itself is pretty much not that important, as digital signals are less prone to “noise”, however severe degradation will result in spotty digital data, and therefore broken sound, so a really crappy cable might cause problems. You can use a coaxial cable, video cable, audio cable, whatever you want to call it, but as long as the physical ends are as mentioned, you are in business. That is the good news.

Now, the bad news. For those of you hoping to hook up your nice fancy sound cards to your nice fancy amplifiers and speaker system, and get all the latest goodies without changing settings/cables etc, forget it. You are SOL. * special case exception. This is not to say that things won’t work, it just means that there is not ONE setup, that will get you everything. This is due to the goofy way these sound cards are set up. Even though your amplifiers may support several different audio signal inputs, and the sound card can also support several different signals, the current implementation won’t allow all your gear to play nice.

If you simply want to get digital audio (5.1), using the above cable, make sure you change your sound card settings to use digital output only(find it yourself), make sure AC3 encoding on your Sb is on (another word for Digital), and make sure you set it up for two speakers (yes, two). If you try to set it to a 5.1 speaker system, you will only get the left and right audio. This is caused by stupid drivers that assume that if you have selected any more than 2 speakers, you must be using the SB as the digital decoder, and outputs the signals via the independent speaker outputs on the card, even though you have specified digital output. The end result is, with the above settings (you might have to tweak your independent configuration) you will get Dolby Digital 5.1 from your sound card, into your amplifier, and it will sound great. However, because you need to set your sound card up as a 2 speaker (stereo) configuration, your computer games will not play in surround modes properly, simply stereo. Few games (if any) support dolby digital, so you will just have to listen to them in stereo. That means Doom 3 is stereo only. Sorry.

* exception. Two possible ways around this, are, to forget about using your amplifier as the Digital decoder, and to hook up the SB card outputs to you amplifier using the individual channel inputs, ie front to front, center to center, rear to rear. If you are lucky your amplifier can do this, and in this case, you turn your sound card digital output off, select a 5.1 speaker setup, and you will hear your movies in 5.1 dolby digital, AND your computer games will also play in surround modes. Of course, for purists, there will be an audio degradation as you will be sending an analog (converted from digital by your sound card) signal to your amp instead of a digital one, and the wiring is much uglier. Plus, you will have to use the SB software to adjust levels, sub cutoff, etc. it also may limit what other gear you can plug into your amplifier as all of the inputs may be used. But it does work. The second, as mentioned by another poster, is to spend gobs of money on a seperate digiatl encoder, and feed your sound card signals into it, then into your amp.

The solution to this, would be if the sound card converted non digital signals (including surround modes) and converted them to dolby digital. Then, you could have it all, but I have not yet found a card that can do this, maybe some day.

Hope this info helps.
 
Okay I figured it out, thanks for the help.

The problem was that the volume for surround was off. Nice.
 
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