Digital S/PDIF 5.1 surround sound

Horne65

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I have been using a Gigabyte Aorus Ultra Z390 Motherboard with onboard Realtek drivers connected to Logitech Z906 5.1 speakers. On till recently everything was fine but as soon as I updated to Windows 11 everything went south. Realtek no longer offer support for 5.1 surround sound making the on board Aorus ultra and others only capable of 2.1 speaker connection.

To remedy this I purchased an Asus Xonar SE sound card which states it is fully 5.1 capable, what the manufacturer fails to state is that the 5.1 surround is only available via analogue and not digital S/PDIF.

Is there any was to remedy my desire for digital 5.1 surround sound? Is there a PCIE sound card that is around the £100 to £150 price that can actually provide 5.1 via S/PDIF only?

If this has been covered before please accept my apologies.
 
Have you tried re-installing the sound drivers provided by Gigabyte for the Z390 motherboard ?

Also for the Asus Xonar try the modded uni xonar drivers and see if they do anything.

Be sure to uninstall any Asus sound drivers and control panels before doing the above.
 
Next010, yes tried the Gigabyte drivers but it's Realtek that no longer supports 5.1. I have asked Gigabyte if they are going to find a work around for this but never got a reply.

I searched Asus and forums and have found that Asus xonar SE never had support for SPDIF 5.1 but do not publish this which is misleading customers.

That's why. Before I make any other moves I want to know if any PCIE cards provide true SPDIF digital 5.1.

Not sure but I think the move from big speaker setups to headphones has something to do with this.
 
S/PDIF receivers generally only understand surround sound in the Dolby AC-3 or DTS encodings, not S/PDIF's normal encoding. Dolby and DTS never managed to work out deals with OS or sound chip manufacturers to get their technology widespread on PC.

I believe the patents on Dolby Digital did expire in 2017, but there's not been much life in the soundcard market for a while now so I'm not surprised if development has slowed enough that it's not been implemented (and supporting early 90s lossy audio compression isn't exactly a big selling point).

If your source is already in one of those encodings then most soundcards should be able to bitstream it even if they don't support on the fly AC-3/DTS encoding. Although this will require bypassing the OS mixer so you won't hear any other sounds from the PC over that input.

IIRC the Dolby and DTS encoders are (were?) branded Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect so any soundcard listing one of those should work to do on the fly encoding.
 

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