No Sound From Rear Speakers

**rigg419** · 01-16-2007, 10:43 PM

Ok, so I've been serching for the last couple hours and haven't found much in the way of an answer to this particular problem.

The sound in my rear speakers seems to have stopped working, except not really.

My setup is an intel mac-mini in my car running bootcamp to an external usb sound blaster live, then to my 4 channel amp and out to my 4 speakers.

Now, if I'm in Creative's speaker test app, and I have it on 4/4.1 then I can hit either the channel or noise test and hear all four speakers announce their presence (i.e "front left....front right... etc...").

However, when listening to anything out of my front end (Centrafuse) or anything else (like sirius plugged into the line in of the sound blaster) then only the front speakers work.

This has me totally baffled, and nothing I've tried (uninstalling/reinstalling the sound card and drivers, messing with the control panel settings etc..) has fixed it.

Since the creative app tells me the speakers are working, I know it must be some sort of conflict in software, but I can't think of what it could be.

I think that's the most smilies I've ever used in a post. Anyway, does Anyone have any ideas??

**pancit175** · 01-17-2007, 07:15 PM

does your soundcard have any options for anything called "rear fill" or "virtual surround" etc. It should be controlled through your soundcards program control panel some how. Which soundcard do you have?
It's in there somewhere, at least it should be...

**rigg419** · 01-18-2007, 12:10 AM

Thanks for the response

It has audio effects, I don't know about virtual surround cause I never even thought about it. Anyway, it's a soundblaster Live! USB external card 24bit -though I think it told me it will only operate in 16bit cause of something something [been a long time since it said that]-

I found out today that if I switch the outputs so that the back speakers think they're the front and vice versa, that they all sound fine except my front speakers only play the lows....

I'm sure something really obvious is going on here but I can't seem to see the forest for the trees...

I'll check out the "rear fill/virtual surround" on my card's utility and see if that does the trick, thanks for the suggestion

DIGItonium · 01-18-2007, 09:16 AM

You need to enable CMSS and select the proper CMSS mode to mirror the front/rear channels.

**rigg419** · 01-18-2007, 11:52 AM

well, as it turns out, somehow I changed the 3D audio setting in the sound blaster utility. Changing it back to "stereo surround" fixed my problem.

I knew it was going to be something stupid, but I would have been banging my head against the wall for prolly a week without the feedback

thanks guys