I belive that I have a unique problem with my xfi and 5.1 speakers

Question

<!-- @page { size: 2cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.2cm } -->I wanted to have eax the other day so i bought sb xfi with front panel. I was happy. I installed the card (pci version) and my onboard sound card gone away. And i was sad . But i told myself you ve got the new and shiny sound blaster, not to worry everything ll be find. It wasnt. Since i have a 5. cambridge dtt 3500 and an optical cable as only connection i was forced to buy either a new sound card or a motherboard in order to have that socket in my pc. First as said earlier i bought the sound card. I plugged it in and, only two channels ware playing. I went and did some research about that problem and I found out that the optical socket doesnt have 5. support. SO I BOUGHT A NEW MOTHERBOARD (oh, my wallet sniff sniff ;( ) New asrock x38 turbo twins without wifi. It had just what i needed. An optical socket. I plugged all the wires to the motherboard and there was a time for a speakers test. SUCCES! Speakers sounded beautifully in 5. . And i was happy again. So the time to lunch some games came. And i installed some that have eax support. Then i was denied my beloved feature and my frustration grew. Some time passed and i gave my xfi another chance. BUT NOW it seems to have some problems because earlier it had multiple connection options in my windows's vista x64 speaker connection box. Now there are only 3. One because i changed my graphics to radeon 5850 and therefor it has nati've hdmi support (currently using that one), one for speakers from xfi and one for spdif out. I ve installed the drivers correctly and now they're updating. I ve plugged in into front panel head phone jack and microphone jack and it doesnt seem to noticed. I dont have that gamer/music/entertainment console thingy. The creative support faq was little help to me because i didnt get what they wanted me to buy and on forums i ve read that either i should buy an external decoder for God? know how much or do some modding into my speakers for multiple line sound sending and since i just want to enable eax in games and have 5. sound Im not keen on any moding or another buying spree. So please help me enable those features using my motherboard or xfi, any help ll be much appreciated.
PS: I let you know how it goes after the update.

Answer 1

optical is only going to give those speakers 5. on content that is encoded in dolby digital. That is pretty much limited to dvd's. You either have to use Dolby Digital Li've when converts everything to Dolby Digital or use the analog connections. If you are using a X-Fi you can buy or use a optical cable and buy the <a target="_self" rel="nofollow" href="http://buy.soundblaster.com/_creativelabsstore/cgi-bin/pd.cgi?page=product_detail&category=Software&pid=F 2222DDN6Z2H2ADDEZD">Dolby Digital Li've Pack. The analog way will cause you way less headaches. In the Playback tab of the Windows Vista sound panel there should only be 3 options there. ATI HDMI, Speakers, SPDIF. All the other connections you saw were in the Recording tab. If those are being detected it's most likely because the pins on the front bay aren't aligned correctly. If you installed the drivers from the website none of the other software is included with it and you have to download it seperately. You can still change modes with the Creative Audio Control Panel. That should be in the Creative listing in the programs menu. If you want to enable EAX you have to download and install Alchemy for games that use the Directsound3D engine. Games that use the OpenAL engine don't need it. Here is a <a target="_self" rel="nofollow" href="http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/Lists/Games/AllItems.aspx">list of games[/url] that require alchemy to work.