No rear speakers or center channel when using Digital Co-Ax connection

Question

I'm using the K8N Neo motherboard (so nForce 3 chipset) on-board sound and the Logitech Z-680 speaker system, which has a built in Dolby Digital Decoder.
When I use a coax cable to connect my speakers to the digital co-ax output on the motherboard, I only get sound from the two front speakers and the sub, but not from the center or rear channels.
When I try to use the MSI Sound Manager to enable the sound output, the "6 CH + S/PDIF (Coaxial)" option under the "Speaker Configuration" tab is grayed out, with only the "8 CH + S/PDIF (Optical && Coaxial)" and the "6 CH + S/PDIF (Optical && Coaxial)" are available.
The surround sound (all 6 channels) does work if I use the direct connectors (the green, orange and black plugs for front, center and rear channels), but I'd rather use the digital co-axial connection.
I also noticed that the sound coming out of the front 2 channels is much louder when using the Coaxial connection than when using the direct connection.
Is there any way to fix this problem so that I can use the coaxial digital connection?

Answer 1

Quote from: Yomn on 03-April-05, 21:16:12
15 September 2004, 12:54:04 am
AND THERE IS NO ANSWER UNTIL NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!    WHAT A FORUM.!!!
If you had bothered to use the search  function you would have found an answer as this has been discussed before!
You only get multi-speaker support digitally if surround encoding is suported. That was avaialble with the nforce2 soundstorm boards, not with the nforce3 or nforce4 baords. Without encoding all you get is the front stero pair.
This is not new as prior to the soundstorm SPDIF equipped cards had only ever produced stereo.