Digital audio question

[Surrealist]

Hello all, first post here, hopefully I can get some much needed help...

I've got a Kenwood VR-405 receiver and it is hooked up to my computer's Soundblaster X-fi elite sound card via an optical cable.

I cannot get Dolby Digital sound nor can I get my sub or rear channels to respond at all.

I used to have all analog connections to the receiver with the same 5.1 speaker set-up and I at least got signal through each speaker. Now I can't. Even if I hook up an analog source now and disconnect the computer completely I still can't get my sub or rears to respond at all.

What did I do? Everything was working fine on my old set-up and now, even when I go back to that old set-up it is broken!
When I do the receiver's channel test it still sends noise to the sub and rears but I can never get any external audio sources to use them.


Can someone please help me? I will greatly appreciate any and all help. thank you.

 

[Hi Ho]

Make sure the receiver is in surround mode and not plain stereo.

Also, you won't get surround sound from the PC using the digital connection for anything but DVD movies. The best you will get for everything else is two channel stereo. The only way around this is to use the analog connections or buy a sound card with Dolby Digital Live encoding.

The X-Fi (and nearly all other cards) does not to real time digital surround encoding. Because of this, everything except DVD soundtracks, which are already encoded in surround, is downmixed to two channels. The few sound cards that have Dolbe Digital Live will create a 5.1 Dolby Digital stream in real time that your receiver can decode.

 

[Surrealist]

Yes, thank you. I understand that I'd have to be sending a digital signal (i.e., dvd) to receive digital sound... but it still won't pick up my rears or sub at all, even when I don't try fo DD and just have an analog line (stereo RCA cables) running straight in. At this point I'd even forgo the Dolby Digital sound just for all channel sound (which, again I did have before just fine)

So, any advice as to why 3 of my speakers suddenly won't work, yet they still spit out noise during speaker tests?

 

[Hi Ho]

Do all of the speakers work if you connect a regular DVD player to the receiver? Have you checked to make sure that the receiver is set in a surround mode and not two channel stereo? If your receiver has a "5 channel stereo" mode or something similar that would give you sound through all of the speakers regardless of the source.