Question Can't get Dolby Digital Live to work (Sound Blaster X3, Logitech Z906, Windows 11 Home 23H2)

[NJW1979]

I own a Sound Blaster X3 and bought a new set of Logitech Z906 5.1 speakers to replace my blown Logitech Z607's during the post-Christmas sales. I want to use analog speakers for gaming and movies that use codecs other than Dolby Digital (Sound Blaster X3 only supports Dolby Digital Live for 5.1 digital audio). I connected the Z906's to the Sound Blaster X3 with an optical cable and the 3x 3.5mm stereo analog jacks. The problem is when I have DDL selected as the output for SPDIF I only get silence, and only get audio from SPDIF if I select 192,000Hz Stereo (2.1 with Bass Redirection enabled), so I cannot get 5.1 digital audio for Dolby Digital encoded movies or my HDTV tuner. I am up the tree with this and am wondering if it's a Windows 11 issue as I remember my old Sound Blaster Zx worked with optical on Windows 7, but I couldn't get any sound out of optical on it on Windows 10, even for stereo.

 

[dwd999]

I own a Sound Blaster X3 and bought a new set of Logitech Z906 5.1 speakers to replace my blown Logitech Z607's during the post-Christmas sales. I want to use analog speakers for gaming and movies that use codecs other than Dolby Digital (Sound Blaster X3 only supports Dolby Digital Live for 5.1 digital audio). I connected the Z906's to the Sound Blaster X3 with an optical cable and the 3x 3.5mm stereo analog jacks. The problem is when I have DDL selected as the output for SPDIF I only get silence, and only get audio from SPDIF if I select 192,000Hz Stereo (2.1 with Bass Redirection enabled), so I cannot get 5.1 digital audio for Dolby Digital encoded movies or my HDTV tuner. I am up the tree with this and am wondering if it's a Windows 11 issue as I remember my old Sound Blaster Zx worked with optical on Windows 7, but I couldn't get any sound out of optical on it on Windows 10, even for stereo.

You could try downloading the latest Dolby Access app from the Microsoft Store and running that on your computer instead of Dolby Digital Live to see if its output is compatible with the Sound Blaster and spdif.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

You can download necessary drivers from here. Uninstall the drivers that you have at this moment and reinstall the latest driver sourced from Creative's support site in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

 

[kerberos_20]

in win10/11 in order to use dolby digital live (or DTS variant), you will need to enable microphone permissions in windows settings, as encoding is routed through "what you hear" microphone output

 

[NJW1979]

It looks like it IS a Windows 11 issue and it affects ALL digital audio. I thought stereo was working on SPDIF, but it was analog stereo. I tested it again with the 3x 3.5mm jacks unplugged and only the optical cable connecting the speakers with the X3 and all SPDIF formats are silent. It was just playing analog stereo under SPDIF. Microphone access is enabled. SPDIF only outputs stereo sound from SPDIF if the speaker jack for FL/FR is plugged in. I tried this on both optical ports on the Z906 sub without any luck. The last time I had working digital audio was back when I was using Windows 7.