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Any one have the issue of not being able to play audio to all speakers of an AVR?

My windows 8.1 PC does not allow the HDMI output of my AMD ATI card to do 5.1. I hook it up to my AVR and it does not play audio through all of the 5 speakers... only 2 of them. Is there any way you know of to enable 5.1 sound, or at the least have ALL the speakers play the same audio?
Windows 8.1 (full updates)
AMD Radeon 7900, most update drivers
IX38 quad gt motherboard Sound card is realtek, but I disabled it to enable HDMI audio out to my AVR.

Serialnuker wrote:

Any one have the issue of not being able to play audio to all speakers of an AVR?

My windows 8.1 PC does not allow the HDMI output of my AMD ATI card to do 5.1. I hook it up to my AVR and it does not play audio through all of the 5 speakers... only 2 of them. Is there any way you know of to enable 5.1 sound, or at the least have ALL the speakers play the same audio?
Windows 8.1 (full updates)
AMD Radeon 7900, most update drivers
IX38 quad gt motherboard Sound card is realtek, but I disabled it to enable HDMI audio out to my AVR.

Your source would only be 2 channels. If you want it to upmix it to 5.1 the chances are that your AVR has a surround mode for music (or set it to dolby pro logic).

Edit: Sorry, but I jumped to the conclusion that it is music that you are trying to play. If it is movies with a 5.1 track, then make sure that your speaker configuration is set correctly in the windows setting.

In the playback device properties, I believe there's a way to select the multichannel formats that your receiver supports. (DTS, Dolby Digital, etc) There should also be a means of indicating whether you're running stereo speakers, 2.1, 5.1, etc. This link covers the process for 7, but I believe it's essentially the same in 8: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... eiver.html

However, equally important are the source file and playback software. Do the files contain a true multi-channel audio track, or are you trying to get two channel audio to expand to all of your speakers? (Which as mentioned previously, would be an AVR setting.) Also, various player software and/or codec packs can impact all of this behavior as well.

More details would help enable us to provide better info.

If all your sound materials are stereo, you will need either playback software to expand/multiply to play to all speakers, or your AVR needs to support upmixing (mine does simple multiplication and fancy "surroundification" by analyzing frequency bands).

If you are talking DTS/DD-encoded audio embedded in movie files, then either your playback software needs to decode them and send out discrete 5.1 audio over HDMI, or you need to set "bitstream mode" so that the AVR can decode the audio (where you should get a DD/DTS light up on the receiver).

yeah, set your AVR to Prologic or 5.1 dedicated mode.

HDMI is a two way link. If the graphics card's audio codec detects a two channel codec at the other end, it'll throw two channels down the pipe. If it sees a 5.1 codec at the other end, it'll send up to 6 channels down the pipe.
I'd start by looking at the AVR end first, assuming you've done the obvious and configured speakers in Windows (Playback devices, select your AVR from the list, Configure)