Asus P6T Deluxe + Windows 7 - 7.1?

[Shozuki]

How do I turn on surround sound in Windows? I can only see 2 channel audio support, any idea's lads?

Thanks

[Velcro]

Go to, Control Panel>Hardware & Sound>Manage Audio devices. Then on the playback tab, select your speakers then hit the configure button. That will get you in to the speaker set up.

[smouty]

What audio output are you using? You also may need to change the default audio device which you can do by right clicking the 'speaker' icon in the tray area.

[Shozuki]

Go to, Control Panel>Hardware & Sound>Manage Audio devices. Then on the playback tab, select your speakers then hit the configure button. That will get you in to the speaker set up.

Perfecto, many thanks!!

[Shozuki]

...or perhaps not. Im running the system through Optical Out and the configure option is greyed out, hence I cant select surround....

Help is appreciated folks!

[Hohum]

You can't get 7.1 through optical out/SPDIF. The highest available is 5.1, and that requires a DDL or DTS compatible receiver. Besides that, if you want surround sound for stuff besides movies, then you need a sound card that has DDL/DTS encoding support.

[Shozuki]

my reciever is DTS compatible and 5.1 is all I need! but I cant seem to select it!! its doing my nut in! Beside that my new i7 rig is great!

[Hohum]

You won't be able to unless the sound card you're using has DDL/DTS encoding support. This generally only comes with discrete cards, such as the Asus Xonar, Creative X-FI, etc (although they may charge you extra for the software needed - I know that Creative do for their older cards).

[Shozuki]

so the motherboards optical out 7.1 wont work?

[sj33]

SPDIF only supports 2.0 as standard, and always has. 5.1 is achieved by using compression such as Dolby Digital or DTS. Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES are variants that can provide 7.1 by matrixing the extra channels into the other channels (I think true discrete DTS-ES 7.1 is possible though?).

Your motherboard sound control panel probably has an option called Dolby Digital Plus or DTS Connect which will encode the output into those formats on the fly, but they probably don't support encoding into Dolby Digital EX or DTS-ES.

If possible, use analogue or HDMI to achieve 7.1. Other than that, you'll have to live with Dolby Digital Live 5.1 encoding.