What's really pissing me off at the moment is the bullshit transitional phase that PC audio is going through.

My home theater surround sound works a treat when you feed the AV receiver a digital signal but getting the 5.1 signal from a game from a PC digitally is an absolute nightmare. I could just go straight into the multi-channel analogue ins but the bass redirection/crossover is a bit messy and the sound can be noisier depending on the source. In order to get 5.1 from a game into my receiver I've got to use either Dolby Digital Live or Dolby Theater Surround Connect which encodes the signal on-the-fly into a single digital bitstream which can be decoded by the receiver. The soundcards that support these standards are pretty expensive and come with all sorts of features I'm unlikely to use but more importantly it seems that most of them have trouble dealing with legacy games (ie. Windows XP 32bit) in Windows 7/Vista. I've got Windows 7 64bit and I'm a bit scared to sink £80+ on something that might not work as intended.

On XP I was using a Creative Audigy 2 ZS and had tried Creative's own drivers and software but they were atrocious at handling the bass redirection/crossover (rendering my subwoofer absolutely useless) and couldn't maintain their volume settings for some bizarre reason (this was dangerous for my speakers). I then stumbled across some unofficial but reputed kX drivers which were much more solid and heavily customisable but didn't support EAX. I'm not entirely convinced that the positional audio and bass redirection was up to spec either. They were the best I could do and so I resigned myself to them until I was to get a new rig.

Now I've got a new rig I'm in a similar bloody situation. I'm currently using Realtek's onboard HD audio and while it sounds fine (much better than I expected after some tweaking), its bass 'management' is… well, it isn't. I've got no control over it apart from being able to toggle it on or off. Nice. Then there's the 'Full Range Speakers' option. I don't have full range speakers but when I toggle this option everything sounds a whole lot better which leads me to believe that the bass management isn't doing a very good job and my sub isn't being used as intended. The line-in/mic input volume slider intermittently goes up on-screen as well without me touching it. I mean, I can literally sit there watching it move.

Then to top things off I installed Clear Sky (which now runs like silk) and the surround sound wouldn't work! After some poking about I found an OpenAL 'soft' file to use but I'm a bit worried that this sort of stuff might happen more often seen as Windows 7 doesn't play too nicely with legacy games (of which there are many ie. most of 'em).

I don't know. Proper 5.1 systems don't work too well with PCs in my opinion. Headphones ftw. Or PS3s, they sound super.

Anyway, I needed to rant about that.

Just been reading about the Aureal fiasco. That sounded nasty. Let's hope that Asus don't somehow get the same treatment with their Xonar cards emulating EAX.

I remember Thief and System Shock 2 very fondly on my Soundblaster Live! There were few games to match the splendour of their sound design at the time but EAX was something that just worked really well with them. I think the next big surprise audio-wise was when I bought my Audigy 2 ZS (before I had my 5.1) for Battlefield: 2142. I remember just sitting there agog, listening to the clarity and dynamism of the audio over my onboard Realtek, wondering how the hell I'd been playing it without a Creative card. Again though, DICE really know what they're doing in the audio department, so much so that when I moved on to Quake Wars everything seemed comparatively lifeless.

Perhaps the game that has left the biggest impression on me since BF:2142 is Dead Space. It was that game that made me buy my 5.1. I'd played it on a friend's PS3 before I had my own and saw that it had won an Edge award for best audio. I figured that if I was going to get a PS3 and Dead Space I was going to have to get a good sound system to do it justice, and that's what I did. The problem now is getting the PC to play nicely with it.

Before my previous post I was eying up the Auzentech Forte, an apparently very good (but expensive) sound card based on Creative's own X-Fi chip, but shortly after finishing it I realised that, if all I need is to get a game's 5.1 signal to my receiver digitally then why don't I just buy the cheapest card which supports DDL and/or DTS Connect?

It turned out that one of the cheapest cards (and one I'd been looking at months ago for my previous rig) offered DDL in addition to Directsound and emulation of EAX in Windows Vista/7 on the card itself without having to download any third party apps like 3D Sound Back or ALchemy. The card I've gone for is the Asus Xonar DX which has cost about £50 rather than £115 for the Forte. I'll have to let you know how I get on with it. I've high hopes after all the glowing reviews I've read.

Also, my computer with its guts exposed!

By the way: what are membrane speakers? That sounded painful realising that they were shit after years of use. I hadn't been using my onboard audio for that long before getting the Audigy 2 ZS but that was pretty nasty hearing the difference.

And regarding the sub woofer position: I spent a while shifting it around and read that you can actually stick the sub where you're likely to sit and crawl around the room listening for the sweet spot. Once you hear it swap yourself with the sub. Due to the limitations of my cable length and space for the damn thing I ended up putting it next to the left of the TV anyway and thankfully it works quite nicely there. When I was living at my parents' the sub was in a really crap position and as a result nearly everywhere anybody sat was LFE-less apart from in front of the radiator where it sounded awesome but that wasn't an especially convenient place to sit. They're funny old things. One day I'll get some full range speakers and be done with it.

Scout said:

Yes, 2.1 is blessedly simple in its way. USB out to a little tube DAC/AMP and out to speakers. I do run speaker wire from the amp to the sub first and THEN to the speakers. Very simple and pretty foolproof.

You have the sub handle the crossover before it gets to the speakers? Interesting. That's another option if my latest solution goes breasts skyward. I'd considered it but my mind got a bit tangled when I thought of how many cables I'd be running to the sub...

Well for whatever reason the Asus speaker test that came with the Xonar DX software doesn't seem to work for me so for about 30 minutes I was sat scratching my head wondering why I wasn't getting any sound. By this point I'd upped the volume a bit and got my headphones on (big mistake) and decided to test the sound from the Sound section in the Control Panel instead. !!DIDDLING!! ARGGH!!

There was sound and soiled slacks.

Dolby Digital Live encoding worked like a dream and the receiver is making the most of it now. My biggest gripe is with the Asus mixer which is just really fiddly and nowhere near as intuitive as it should be, especially compared to Realtek's less-is-more equivalent. It's not possible to mute channels without having to lower their volumes via the teeny-tiny sliders, the teeny-tiny sliders are a pain in the arse to adjust, it's not possible to save different configurations so everything has to be tweaked depending on what you're wanting to do. It's just a bit disappointing after the robust customisation options offered by the kX drivers. Anyway, I'm not complaining, there are a lot of other options which should prove useful in the future.

Now to get Clear Sky's surround working with EAX…