Only the front 2 speakers working with a 5.1 set up when playing mus

Question

I have a xtreme gamer card, with the 2.5.0006 driver installed which worked fine up until recently. Recently only the front 2 speakers play when playing music. All 5 produce sound when tested from either the creative console or windows sound manager. So all 5 are correctly connected, yet when music is played only the front lef and front right speakers are used.
I'm using vista 32-bit.
If there is already a thread on this particular problem (all 5 work on a test and it's a 5. not 6. system) then I apologise but would still like a link. Thank you for your advice.

Answer 1

You should email Creative support and report the problem.
CMSS-3D has problems with the latest beta on Vista x64, but you're running 32-bit Vista on their release drivers, which is supposed to work fine.
If you get a message saying 'would you like to disable audio enhancements?' and you click 'yes', you are disabling CMSS-3D from working, which is the function that transforms normal stereo music into multi-speaker music.
You can try re-enabling it manually:
Open Sound Control Panel.
Select your output device (e.g., Speakers.)
Hit the Properties button at the bottom of the Sound Control Panel.
Select the Sound Blaster tab.
Uncheck the 'Disable Sound Blaster enhancements.'
Hit OK, and OK.
Go into the Creative Audio console, make sure you're in Entertainment mode, and go into the CMSS-3D panel, set your settings here as you like it.
Pray.
Test.
That may not work, especially if the driver / operating system was reporting problems with CMSS-3D in the first place; you may end up getting garbled sound or an error message again.
Send your details to Creative so they can try to work on it, because it sounds like driver issues to me.