Creative inspire t6300 5.1 surround on mac pro 1.1, optical out to 5.1 audio gear (digital sound decoder).

Question

Hi there,
Been searching and trying a lot but no luck so far. I have a surroundset Creative Inspire t6300
to be able to add some more fun to movies and a few games on my mac.
I own an upgraded Mac Pro 1.1 under Snow leopard, 2.33 gHz, dual processor, 8 core, 8 gb memory.
Even though it`s a piece for the museum, it works very well for designwork I do for work. No real need
to update for me, so....
As I understand, the optical out is standard 5.1. (By the way, the only other ports are the basic sound ports out
and in on the Mac). So after some research I found and got the 5.1 audio gear decoder. I connected this with
an opticle cable and used the 3,5 jackets from the surroundset  to connect to (from left to right) cen/sw, (yellow
jacket) fl/fr (green jacket), sl/sr (black jacket) on the decoder. All perfectly understandable and it seemed to work well.
But when I tested with some of the testfile you find when googling on that, I think there is something wrong,
the typical surround effect is not there, it rather sounds more like stereo or even 5 mono`s.
I`ve tried Soundflower and JackPilot, but couldn`t get it right. With Soundflower I was able to choose 5.1 setting
(was not possible before) but testing it didn`t work.
There is an extensive test of the decoder on the net by someone who really is deep into the technics of it all but
no luck there either.
Back to basics: is it right that the optical out is truely 5.1 on the mac? With several tests the unit SFE does not react.
But when I play some music with iTunes, it works (loud and clearly :-)).  Maybe I need a visit to the audiologist ;-) ?
Anyone?
tested with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL9-sIZRDHg&channel=alexnosenko
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMh_zvCw6us
https://www2.iis.fraunhofer.de/AAC/multichannel.html

Answer 1

Hello John, I figured it was a signal issue. All the speakers fire and the sound is great. I was running the speakers thru a Dell PC with a Creative X-Fi Elite Pro, THX Certified, 7.1 soundcard using a fiber optic from the Mac Pro to the Z906's, it worked great until the Dell died!!! When I bought the soundcard from Creative I also bought the GigaWorks S750, THX Certified, 700 watt, 7.1 speaker system, used the speakers for 11 years and then the woofer/amp said "I QUIT" Creative quit making the speaker system and the sound card. The satellite speakers from the Creative GigaWorks speaker system still sound great (rated at 78 watt each) and are a little better speaker than the one's that came with the Z906 and the wattage from the 906 is sufficient to drive the satellites without any distortion. Thank you for addressing my issue, you confirmed what I suspected all along, just needed to hear it from someone with the same setup.
One last question, I purchased a Diamond Multimedia USB Soundcard, can't use the fiber optic(not supported by Mac) but the green, tan and black RCA's plug in and produces adequetly. When you plug your 906's into the Mac Pro using the fiber optic how do you set your speaker configuration? When I plug into the mac pro with fiber optic the 'Audio Midi Setup' does not seem to see the 5.1 configuration. Any thoughts there?
Carl