Only 2 speakers work Vista 64Bit

Grimspoon

Grimspoon

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I have installed Vista 64bit and I can't seem to get my surround sound working when playing Mp3's.....If I do a surround sound test in the Realtek HD audio manager the test runs fine, all speakers work...but playing Mp3's only 2 speakers work..I have searched google, have found a few people with the same issue but no answers....Any ideas? I am running the Realtek onboard sound on a Asus P5ND.
 
your mp3's are two channel files, and you have two speakers working. so there is no problem as such.

what you are trying to do, by expanding the two channels into 6 pseudo channel sound is a function of some soundcard software, not windows itself. dont think the realtek card can do this natively, had a quick look at my control panel realtek hd audio applet and there isnt anything there to do this.

you will need a plugin for the program playing the media then to be able to expand to 6 channels.
 
Ok, I have been using XP and it was working fine, Mp3's played through all speakers.
 
Grim what drivers did you use? Remember vista is a bit driver sensitive. Is that the drivers from vista or did you download the latest drivers?
 
killadoob said:
Grim what drivers did you use? Remember vista is a bit driver sensitive. Is that the drivers from vista or did you download the latest drivers?
Click to expand...

I used the drivers that came with my mobo, 64bit drivers....Didn’t have time last night, but going to try find others.

Also when playing COD4 the sound is only be coming out 2 speakers, sounds like I am shooting in a cake tin :D

Edit: O and another huge problem is that I can't get into Vista without having the disk in the drive, otherwise I get the error BOOTMGR missing, or something like that..fun and games ;)
 
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OMW thats must be the strangest thing i have ever heard of lol

Reload vista again, sounds like a dodgy install, yes i would download the latest drivers as i am not sure how old your mobo is, also i do know some companies do not support vista as well as they should.

Have you set your bios to boot first with your hdd?
Also remember vista don't give up to easily, to many people give up with vista. Did you format your hdd before installing?
 
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mmm, I remember having the same problem, I had to dig into the sound options somewhere and eventually found the control panel for speakers and changed them from 2 speaker to 5.1.

I can't remember exactly where it was, when i get home tonight, I'll go dig it up for you and post exactly what clicks took me there.

It's my only gripe with Vista, to stop users from doing things to their machines, they put lower-level functions a little bit obscurly hidden behind other options, other than that - still my favorite OS to date....Vista X64 that is, I don't like the 32 bit version...
 
killadoob said:
OMW thats must be the strangest thing i have ever heard of lol

Reload vista again, sounds like a dodgy install, yes i would download the latest drivers as i am not sure how old your mobo is, also i do know some companies do not support vista as well as they should.

Have you set your bios to boot first with your hdd?
Also remember vista don't give up to easily, to many people give up with vista. Did you format your hdd before installing?
Click to expand...

I think I will try a repair first and see as I spent like 2 hours last night getting my machine back to its previous state :) But if I need to reload I will do.

My mobo is pretty new, its the Asus P5ND, not very old at all.

Yeah first thing I checked was that my HDD was primary boot, which it is, but still won’t boot without the disk in the drive.
 
leelo said:
mmm, I remember having the same problem, I had to dig into the sound options somewhere and eventually found the control panel for speakers and changed them from 2 speaker to 5.1.

I can't remember exactly where it was, when i get home tonight, I'll go dig it up for you and post exactly what clicks took me there.

It's my only gripe with Vista, to stop users from doing things to their machines, they put lower-level functions a little bit obscurly hidden behind other options, other than that - still my favorite OS to date....Vista X64 that is, I don't like the 32 bit version...
Click to expand...

Thanks leelo - I know what you mean, Howz this - Every time I ran COD4 multiplayer it would hang and crash instantly - guess what fixed the problem? In control panel - sound options - recording - I had to right click and enable 'show disabled devices' and then set stereo mix as default.....I mean WTF!?? :D :D If I hadn’t found that solution on a forum I would have NEVER found that fix.
 
oops didnt see you're boot problem too, hmm I'll try google for some answers, sounds like a problematic boot manager....I had something similar when I installed x64 bit media that was one of those activation patched ones (wouldnt accept my actual retail license), till i eventually got the proper x64 media. The patched version had a linux like bootmgr rather than the proper Vista one....
 
Just checked and I am running the latest Sound Drivers - but anyway before I waste more time I am going to do a repair and see if that fixes the boot problem, then tackle the sound ;)
 
I must say, I have an X-fi and I also had many random unexplained crashes with vista at 1st, till creative released their latest driver, then suddently eveything ran fine...
 
OK I think I have identified the problem, not the fix however....For some reason the OS is seeing my 60 gig IDE drive as the boot drive, when it is actually the 30 gig Sata partition that vista is installed on...I think that is the problem.

Edit: ok this is the problem, I unplugged the IDE drive and now I cant even boot with the DVD in...So what has happened is for some arb reason the bootloader has been written to the IDE drive and not the SATA, I am just goint to format reinstall. Rather than wasting time trying to find a fix.
 
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Grim you turned off the user account control right?

Also i think 30 gigs for a vista drive a slightly small to be honest. i never load windows on partitioned drive, i always have a dedicated drive for my windows OS, not sure why just find you get less complications that way.
 
If you want your mp3s to play through all speakers if you go into the sound options there was an enhancement for virtual surround sound or phantom channels or something. Well at least those were the options I had in mine so could be different in yours...Although I wanna add that I thought their "virtual surround" sounded crud compared to my windows xp so now I just use an optical cable and let the speakers handle the 5.1 (z5500)
 
Ok so Im back, all formatted and reinstalled, everything fine now with booting, boots up fine...Haven’t tried the sound yet but will fiddle now...Yeah 30 is a bit small I agree, but to repartition will be a huge mission. I will reinstall when I get my new drive and have a dedicated drive just for OS.
 
A couple of things you should do now.

Right click on your right select properties and untick index this drive.
type services in the box above the start button and look for windows search and stop it and disable it.

Nothing worse than vista indexing your drive the whole time. :)
 
if you wouldve searched this forum for "bootmgr" you wouldve found the fix i posted, but nevermind hey.
 
If you had posted earlier he would have fixed by now, werner your slowness is costing people time buddie :p
 
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