I have an old Creative Gigaworks ProGamer G550W – a 5.1 Surround System – connected to my Asus P9X79 Pro, and I have never been able to configure my Audio Playback Device as an actual 5.1. But I recently found a step by step procedure posted by “EomaMY” on the forum of Asus’ Republic of Gamers that works like a charm.
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The problems with the “Realtek HD Audio Manager” (installed on a clean machine, i.e. immediately after a fresh install of Windows 8.1 x64) were:
- I had cracking noises in the Center Speaker (See here). I had no such noises with the Microsoft default drivers.
- with the “Realtek High Definition Audio” Speakers configured as a “5.1 Surround” in the “Playback Devices” configuration pane of Windows, I never got any sound from the Speaker Pair connected either to the Rear Speaker Jack or to the Side Speaker Jack.
- with my Speakers configured as a “7.1 Surround“, I didn’t get sound from the Speaker Pair if connected to the Rear Speaker Jack. But I got sound from this Speaker Pair if connected to the Side Speaker Jack as far as I was disabling the “Rear Pair” in the “Speaker Setup“. Unfortunately, with such a config, I was not getting any sound from the Rear Pair when playing 5.1 movies within Plex Home Theater.
So, I did follow EomaMY’s procedure:
- Try and re-plug your rear cable back to the rear port.
- Uninstall the audio drivers.
- Reboot.
- Let windows install the standard “windows” drivers, DO NOT install the realtek drivers yet.
- Reboot
- Now install the latest Realtek audio drivers from Asus (not Realtek, those didn’t work for me). Rear cable should still be plugged in rear port.
- Reboot
- Open up Realtek control panel. Now go and change rear cable to side. A notification should pop out.
- Test the 5.1 setup.
5.1 works now fine, including with Plex, and without cracking sounds in the Center Speaker anymore 8)
I did copy/paste here above the procedure of EomaMY. Only notice that I used the Audio Drivers 6.0.1.7335 found on Asus Support webpage for Notebook. This version is more recent than the Audio Drivers 6.0.1.7023 found on the specific Asus Support webpage for P9X79 Pro.
Notice that it’s physically correct to plug the 5.1 “Rear Speakers” in the “Side Speaker Jack”! Indeed, “surrounds” have always been on the sides but nomenclature and general usage vary and confuses the terms. Reading information from Dolby.com, I keep in mind that:
- In a 5.1 system, the ‘Surrounds’ are on the sides.
- In a 7.1 system, the ‘Surrounds’ are on the sides while the ‘Rears’ are the ‘Surround Back’.
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