4.1 Surround Sound

[dachay2tnr]

A little OT, but lemme tap your brains anyway.....

Yesterday I helped a friend set up a new computer system that he bought from Dell. The system has a Turtle Beach sound card, with 4.1 surround sound. When I left him yesterday everything was working fine.

Today he calls me and says he is only getting sound from the two rear speakers and the sub. Nothing from the front speaker pair. I asked him what he did, and of course the answer is, "nothing, I didn't touch nothing."

I tried some of the obvious stuff - check the mixer to make sure 4.1 surround was selected. Same for Sounds in Control Panel.

I had him switch the settings to stereo speakers, just to make sure the front pair were working. They are. However, when switched back to 4.1, no front speakers again.

Any ideas? Obviously, it's a setting somewhere, but I can't find it. He's running WinXP Home, if that makes any difference.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Stealthtech]

What about control panel>sound & audio devices>speaker settings>advanced>speaker setup

There is a flip down list for a number of configs.

 

[TexRoadkill]

I've been having weird problems like that with my XP/SB box. It will switch my audio config from 4 speaker to 2 seemingly at will. I think it's related either to the windows automatic update or it was this one game that seemed to do it. Whenever I switched it back to 4 speaker surround it solved the problem.

 

[dachay2tnr]

Thanks for the replies. FWIW, the guy called Dell suppport and the solution was in the Turtle Beach mixer to set the system up as 5.1 (even though it is really 4.1 and there is a choice for 4.1) and to select analog out rather than digital out.

Not sure I understand this at all, but it did fix the problem. Seems to me it should have worked with 4.1 and digital as well.

Still don't know what happened to cause it in the first place.