5.1 Speaker woes - sound from only 2 of them

bluedog

I've had my 5.1 speakers for a while and they've worked without any problems until recently and I'm only getting sound from 2 of them now.

My pc is a Media Centre pc (on Vista Home premium) so I've tried going through the settings there to change to speaker set up, but it won't let me the select 5.1 option and it's greyed out.

I can't change the set up via control panel options either. When I click to configure speakers, (playback tab) I only get the option of stereo to chose from. I've tried updating device drivers and the message is that it's the right one basically.

Beyond these things I'm completely stumped as I'm not very techie. (I am happy to follow step by step instructions though .)

Can anyone help please? My pc is a Gateway GT5056b and the speakers are Creative T6100.

Sput2001

Sounds like a sound card driver issue.

Do you know what sound card you have installed?

bluedog

Hi,

I think I've looked in the right place, but under the heading "Sound, Video and game controllers" in Device manager, there are 2 items.

Hauppage WinTV PVR PCI II (26xxx) - (The tv tuner??)

And " High Definition Audio Device" - (this is the description I've got in the box to configure the speaker set up too.)

Sput2001

First (and most obvious) thing first: Have the speakers become unplugged, or are they plugged into the wrong socket. It's probably not the problem but it's simple and quick to check.

Joe_Bloggs

Is this the offending article ? It looks like the sound is handled by an integrated INTEL 8-channel (7.1) audio subsystem with five analog audio outputs and one S/PDIF optical digital audio output using the Sigmatel® STAC9271 audio codec.
Perhaps some driver update disabled the channnels.

Has anyone heard a forum for gateway PC users or the users of the Intel® (Love Valley P) P965 Viiv™ motherboard ?

These are my random thoughts.
J_B.

PS my link just works for the gateway support page. A search for GT5056b on this gives the original link.

bluedog

NickMidgley wrote: »

First (and most obvious) thing first: Have the speakers become unplugged, or are they plugged into the wrong socket. It's probably not the problem but it's simple and quick to check.

I've checked all the connections and double-checked it with the speaker manual and all is ok. I tried a system restore to the earliest available one but that made no difference either.

Thanks for the link Joe_Bloggs. I found some information useful there but only US customers benefit from the help functions (mine apparently doesn't exist!) However, I've ended up ringing UK gateway support and the guy reckons I should have "realtek" on my pc ...... definitely not there ...... and told me to download an "Audio Generic Driver". Once this is done, I should have "Realtek Audio Manager" as an option on my control panel and should fix it.

I've gone to the website, but haven't much idea of what I'm supposed to be downloading as I couldn't find "Audio generic Driver" in a search on there. My pc is 32 bit and there are 2 options from what I can work out that may be what I need. The first is a zip file and the other is an executable file.

Hopefully this is the link to the page I'm looking at for the driver.

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=14&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Am I anywhere close to what I need please?

Joe_Bloggs

@Bluedog
I have visited the realtek site in the link and they seem to have many versions of the same driver (2.08). This is split into versions for vista and XP and each version is available as either a zip archive file or an executable. My guess for a vista media system is to go for the vista executable file. The dates on the files are 5th November 2008. The readme file tells you what to do. It might appear misleading when it mentions a CD because the files it refers to will be in a directory of your choosing when you downloaded the file.
J_B.
PS The zip file would need to be unzipped by an archiving utility before it could be executed. I am fond of 7Zip.