Problem with surround sound - new Home Theatre

Awk

I just purchased an Onkyo 7.1 surround sound system and it's my first audio installation. I plugged the speakers all correctly, plugged the sub. During a sound test I hear all 7 speakers.

I have my pc outputting to the receiver via HDMI. Then, the receiver is outputting to my display screen via another HDMI. The display works great, but all listening modes only emit sound through the 2 front speakers and sub. The only mode that works with all 7 speakers is All-Channel Stereo (it doesn't sound very good, I think it's just a simulation surround sound.). Windows sound configuration detects a 7.1 system.

Am I doing the outputs wrong? I'm stumped.

edit: it's a Geforce GTX 560 video card.

Draygo

Whatever audio you are listening to on the pc might only be 2 channel.

You need to play something that is surround sound in order to get surround sound without doing 'simulation' surround sound.

Try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA4PlwSKj8A

yurnamehere

What exactly are you listening to? Something like a CD, which is only stereo to begin with, is only going to use two channels for output unless you use a simulated surround-sound option.

If you're running Windows 7, most games from the pre-Win7 era will also only use 2 channels under normal circumstances, even if the game theoretically supports more. This is a limitation of DirectX 11. (I believe this applies to DirectX 10 and Vista, as well.)

Awk

I'm at work right now so I can't check exactly what I was listening to but Itunes music for example played only from the 2 front and sub. I'm assuming music is definitely surround?

zerzhul

Awk wrote: »

I'm at work right now so I can't check exactly what I was listening to but Itunes music for example played only from the 2 front and sub. I'm assuming music is definitely surround?

Music is almost always 2 channel, not surround.

Awk

I'll have to test out Draygo's surround sound test and see where I stand from there. Will report back in a few hours.

Casually Hardcore

I don't think anything on youtube streams in 5.1 or above.

Don't you have any dvds? Just throw one of those in and see if you're getting sound out of your surround speakers.

Awk

I dont have a dvd player.

I tried playing Max Payne 3 just now and it's playing only the two front speakers and sub. The rest of the speakers have a hiss coming out of them.

Awk

edit: still tinkering

Yar

This can actually be a complicated issue, and one that I've spen a lot of time with myself. I also run my PC to an Onkyo 7.1 receiver and then to a TV.

An important thing to address first is what hardware is driving the sound.

In other words, your sound card. On-board? Dedicated? What chipset/technology?

Then, if you want to really understand what's going on, you have to think about precisely what type of signal/information is being sent to the receiver.

Based on your post, I assume you're using the GTX 560 as the sound card. Most on-board and mid-to-low-end dedicated sound cards don't do a lot surround for you, especially not over HDMI. They will only send two channels, left and right. If you have a movie with a pre-encoded 5.1 or 7.1/9.1 audio track, the video card will likely pass that straight along to the receiver, in which case the receiver is getting the same info it would get form a DVD player and you're good to go. That is what is meant when it says "7.1" support in the video driver specs. It means, "if your content is already an encoded and compressed 5.1/7.1 audio stream, I'll recognize that and I'll just pass that stream right along out the HDMI." However, it does NOT mean "I'll take any sound source you've got and encode it and compress it into DD5.1 or DTS7.1 and send that out the HDMI." Without specific technology to do the encoding and compression on the fly, your GTX is going to take take whatever sound info is being sent to it and do its best to convert it into 2.0/2.1 L/R. In some cases this means just stereo. In some cases, depending on your setup, this can mean screwed up sound, because something on the PC end is trying to split the dialogue into a center channel, for example, and then the GTX is ignoring that channel, so you can't hear voices.

If you have music, that is almost always 2.0. Even if you try to tell the PC to expand it to 7.1, it will still down-convert back to 2.0 before sending it over HDMI (unless you have a better/newer sound hardware). Your receiver can then attempt to do what it will with 2.0 channel music, which should be more than just all-channel stereo. You should have some THX-Music or Pro-logic Music listening modes on the Onkyo that will spread it out a little better. Though (again it gets complicated) some receivers will get stingy about 2-channel digital over HDMI, and refuse to treat it as anything except 2-channel.

Better sound hardware on the PC may have something like Dolby Digital Live, which encodes the sound information into a DD5.1 stream on-the-fly. In which case the PC is sending 5.1 to the receiver. You can then use the PC (sound drivers/software) to expand the 2.0 to 5.1 first, then let the receiver fake the rear channels with an SX2 listening mode or something.

So... A GTX video card isn't much of a sound card. It should pass along a pre-encoded DD or DTS stream from a movie just fine. But a 2.0 music source will be sent as just 2.0. Game content, which is generated in real-time and positional, could theoretically be played 7.1 or 9.1 or whatever you want, but it will be consolidated into only 2-channel L/R before the GTX will allow it to be sent out over HDMI. Some sound cards have DD Live, which can encode 5.1 on-the-fly for you. It takes the raw sound info and makes it a DD5.1 encoded stream for you.

Other sound cards, even cheaper ones, offer analog outs. I went that route. I made sure to get a receiver with 7.1 multichannel analog inputs and a sound card with 7.1 analog outs. So yeah, I've got 4 25-foot cables (they are basically 3.5mm stereo headphone cables on one end and RCA stereo coax on the other) going from my Sound Blaster sound card to my Onkyo. That way, I can do everything on the PC as far as PC sound goes. The sound card handles all the audio processing and then sends 8 separate analog sound signals to the receiver, which then does a minimum of its own positional EQ stuff on it before sending it straight back out to the speakers. I went this route because I could do a superb job handling any sound source on the PC, even 7.1, with a relatively low-end sound card. I even put the L/R output on a splitter and ran it to my regular PC speakers, too, so whenever I want, I click a button to tell the sond card "hey just stereo for now" and it sends everything 2.0 to the PC speakers and I turn the Onkyo off.

Skyrim sends positional sound data to the sound blaster driver, which then creates 8 distinct channels of sound without any faking of channels or up/down-converting. Sounds awesome! The only drawback is that if I have a 5.1 movie source, I can't use the Onkyo to fake the rear channels. Since it is hooked up analog multichannel, the Onkyo refuses. Of course, since the video is still coming over HDMI, I can get around this by switching the audio output in the PC to go out the video card HDMI, and switching the receiver to use the hdmi audio instead of analog, and then setting the listening mode on the Onkyo to fake the last two channels. But that's a lot of work for those few rare cases where I have 5.1 source but no 7.1.

A higher-end sound card could do 5.1 on-the-fly, but even then I'd lose two channels of "true" sound (on games) that even the cheaper card is willing to do for me over analog. Maybe some will encode 7.1 on the fly, I don't know.

Let me know if you have other questions, there are a lot of ways to do it and a lot of ways to screw it up.

Yar

Awk wrote: »

I tried playing Max Payne 3 just now and it's playing only the two front speakers and sub. The rest of the speakers have a hiss coming out of them.

Just noticed this. Yeah, see, games. That's essentially "raw" sound data. The cool thing about it is that Max Payne is a more-or-less fully conceptualized real-time 3D space... so any sound created in that space automatically has all kinds of info associated with it as to exactly where that sound should be in relation to the listener. Like, a bullet firing 190 degrees behind you and 10 feet away, etc., the game already has all that info ready in real time. And the game knows exactly how to talk to a sound driver so that together they figure out exactly how to place that sound in a 7.1 speaker array. The problem is that this all happens on the PC, and doesn't involve compression and encoding. The game is literally send a separate, discrete piece of sound data for every sound that occurs in the game. "Here's a gunshot. It's behind the listener. Here's footsteps. Here's a car, in front of the listener." etc. Thousands of individual messages about sounds to create and how to create them. If the PC had it's own speaker array that it has hooked up to and had separate connections to each speaker, then could take those sound signals and send them right out where they go. But in this case, the PC isn't talking to speakers. Instead, he has to talk to another piece of equipment, over a single data connection. He has to "re-tell" all the information about what sounds and where to play them, in one continuous standardized message to be sent over a digital medium to the receiver. And the best your GTX can do on that is to compress it into a 2.0 stereo format. It can't handle the processing required to take all of that data and, rather than just sending it right out to each speaker, instead write up a description for your receiver of how to play it. It can, but only for 2 or channels. Not 8. Even a cheaper dedicated sound card often won't do more than 2.

Sound cards can often do DD Live or DTS Connect to encode on the fly. Consoles have the equivalent of DD Live built in, and have for years. If you're ok with 5.1 and letting your Onkyo expand it to 7.1, most Creative Labs sound cards, even the cheaper ones, will allow to add DD Live and DTS Connect for like an extra $5 download. Wow, I didn't realize that my cheap sound card is supported. I should buy it just to check it out. However, if you want 7.1, I'm still not sure how to do that except with a sound card that has analog outs and a receiver with analog ins. I can't seem to find reliable information on whether DD Live and DTS Connect technologies will really do 7.1 or not. In fact, it seems that even some newer, higher-end cards don't include 7.1 analogs anymore, only 5.1. Interesting. I think the industry is trying to settle on 1080p and 5.1 as semi-permanent standards. I love my 7.1 though. I don't know why all the digital encoding technologies only say "5.1." DTS is supposed to support 7.1 or even 9.1 I thought.

EDIT: Ok I got interested in researching this again, and my info could be totally out of date. I don't understand as much as I thought about gaming sound over HDMI.

Cabezone

To make it simple for you, if you want proper surround in games you'll want to use the analogue connectors. Your soundcard or motherboard will have stereo mini jacks for outputting L/R front, L/R rear, Center/Sub. You'll want some stereo mini to RCA cables.

Awk

Very useful. I Appreciate the response.

I downloaded a sound test from microsoft and I hear all 8 channels using my gtx 560. But I'm guessing that a sound card is what I need to purchase. What if i plugged it in digitally as opposed to analog?

Awk

Does my receiver have the analog RCA connectors?

Draygo

If you hear all 8 you should be ok then. You just need to be using media with surround encoding.

Awk

Ok cool because things are finally sounding good. I was testing non-surround audio and the like. Even Max Payne 3 pc isn't surround sound after some research.

Cabezone

Unless you have a soundcard that encodes the game audio for the external receiver you're not going to get proper sound out of your games digitally. Most motherboards do not have this feature. Which is why you use the component cables. That pic is pretty blurry but it doesn't look like your receiver accepts component in. So you either need a video card with will convert the audio it outputs to something the receiver can read or you need a different receiver. I don't know which ones do the live encoding nowadays.

EDIT: it looks like most of the gaming soundcards do the live encoding nowadays. I hand't looked into it in a while.

Awk

So my geforce lists this as a feature:

HDMI Support5
Support for HDMI including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D support, x.v.Color, HDMI Deep Color, and 7.1 digital surround sound.

I currently only have an onboard MB sound card. Is it redundant to purchase a sound card? Or will there be benefits?

Cabezone

The card does not encode dolby live, so it won't output surround for games.

gunn88

I was having a similar problem: sound only from the 2 front speakers + subwoofer.
What worked for me was: click Audio/Home button > scroll down till 'Listening Mode' > choose All-Channel.