Using Surround Speakers on a Laptop (please help!)

The out put transisters are probally fried for the front channels,

Your speakers are 5.1, but your laptop has 2.0 audio output, which means that it is a simple stereo (left and right channel output). You will need to connect a USB sound card (such as the Creative X-Fi Surround 5.1) with 5.1 channel connectivity in order to connect your speakers.
Hope this helps.

Please refer to this illustrated document (Click Here).
Let me know if you need further help.
Good Luck

Thanks for using FixYa.

i assume ur mother board supports surround sound an ur using windows os. go to control panel - sounds and audio devices - speaker settings-advanced - speaker set up with the drop down menu. select surround sound - apply - ok.
if ur using surround audio drivers like realtek, etc. the settings console should have somewhat similar options like audio input/output (I/O) options. select surround sound speaker setting and configure which audio port should be audio output ports. driver settings can be accessed from control panel too. to access control panel click on start menu there u'll see the control panel menu.

You need to buy an external sound card, without which you will not be able to get much from your speakers. It will not produce surround sound.

The sound card will give you required jacks and will produce real good sound. You may try audigy cards from creative.

try to download the necessary drivers and reinstall

to localised your problem, try to plug your speakers to other sound source like mp3 player ,stereo system. if still no sound coming from it,your problem is within the speaker system. perhaps the audio power amplifier ic inside, need to be replaced.

Have you check to see if you have the correct driver for the sound card. I know for fact that when reload some mother board that have a build in sound card that carries AC97 drivers it will install or download the AC97 driver with no problem,and no error and it will not work because the driver needs to be upgrade. You might need to get a new sound card. simple and done. Or go through the trouble to find the correct AC97 driver.

good luck

After using the method of last resort (RTFM) I discovered that Yamaha 7.1 amps assign an order of priority to the speakers. The surround speakers have higher priority than the surround-back speakers. I had connected the rear speakers (in a 5.1 configuration) to the surround-back speaker terminals and since nothing was connected to the surround terminals the E-6 error happed on auto-setup.

I eventually fixed this by connecting the rear speakers to the Surround L/R terminals and then, via the manual setup menu, set rear surround = NONE. This causes the amp to route the rear-surround signals to the Surround L/R terminals. The auto-configure then completed successfully.

Hi,

I have a creative SoundBlaster LIVE! 24 Bit External Sound Card and this annoyed me for weeks.

depending on your surround sound reciever depends on the solution.

i have an Acoustic Solutions surround sound system with coxial and optical inputs, aswell as stereo red & white jack inputs.

not knowing the method or connection your using makes it difficult to give you a single solution so i'll list a few.

The soundblaster software shoudl include the Creative Audio console with all sorts of effects, one is CMSS (CMSS-3D) Stereo widening which is still stereo but gives a surround sound effect.. but i'm guessing you payed for 5.1 and you want 5.1 onto the next part

5.1 surround sound can only be produced when the actuall audio your playing contains 5 channels of audio, for example you cant play a stereo song in 5.1 surround sound without some sort of hardware or software sound manipulation. Luckily my surround sound system has Pro Logic II built in and some other effects which convert a 2.1 signal to a 5.1 signal and it works brilliantly. I'm not sure of a software alternative.

setup for your soundcard will be different under XP and Vista also, but there should be a properties option for your sound device where you can select your speaker setup such as headphones, built in speakers, 2.1 speakers, 5.1 speakers, 7.1 speakers and you should be able to manage this from the creative software.

If using Coxial / Optical or SPDIF under vista you MUST set the playback device as SPDIF, at least you have to with my sound card and drivers and seems to be a limitation of the actual sound card drivers for vista.

Personally i was looking forward to hearing the windows login melody in 5.1 surround sound too, but this doesnt happen.

Infact i find that almost all programs bar a few will not play Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 surround sound via any or my output options hence the next solution..

if you have the 5.1 sound but winamp simply just plays it in stereo try the following.

You need to use DirectSound Output:

Preferences (Ctrl-P) > Plug-ins > Output > Select "DirectSound Output"

That should work in most cases, but if not, then:

Checkmark: "Allow hardware acceleration" in DirectSound Output config,
and make sure your sound card/chip is selected as Output Device.

Note that any changes will take effect only after playback is restarted.
In some cases, a Winamp restart is required.

If that doesn't work make sure you have the latest version of DirectX
(v8.x or higher is required)

Winamp 5.25/5.3 and higher:
For actual multi-channel files (ie. aac/wav/ac3/ogg/wma files encoded in 5.1ch surround, as opposed to standard 2-channel stereo mp3's), you need to checkmark "Allow surround sound" in 'Winamp > Prefs > Playback' for the music to play in its original 5.1 channel format (Note that this setting is checkmarked by default).

Windows Vista:
In addition to the above instructions, Vista users will also need to go to:
Control Panel > Sound > Playback tab > Speakers > Configure:
Select: 5.1/7.1 Surround.
Then:
Control Panel > Sound > Playback tab > Speakers > Properties > Enhancements tab
and checkmark "Speaker Fill"

Hope this helps

Anthony Kinson