[SOLVED] SoundBlaster AE-5 Internal SC with the Z906 Speakers

[FarmerFran]

I cannot get the optical cable to work. Was thinking of upgrading to AE-7 or AE-9 but did not want to if the Optical will not work.

 

[kerberos_20]

ae7 or ae9 has same optical output
by default optical will just run dolby/dts streams, stereo pcm has to be enabled manualy in playback settings

 

[FarmerFran]

I must the non-plus edition. Looking at this chart, so no DD/DTS. What the heck is the optical port for then?
Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus - Hi-res PCI-e Gaming Sound Card and DAC with RGB Lighting, Dolby Digital Live, and DTS Encoding - Creative Labs (United States)

 

[kerberos_20]

I must the non-plus edition. Looking at this chart, so no DD/DTS. What the heck is the optical port for then?
Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus - Hi-res PCI-e Gaming Sound Card and DAC with RGB Lighting, Dolby Digital Live, and DTS Encoding - Creative Labs (United States)

thats dd/dts encoders, you need those only if you play 5.1 pcm and want to compress it to 5.1dd/dts (or stereo mp3 to dolby/dts)
im not sure if you need it, anyway...
for playin digital audio through spdif you can stream audio codecs directly to digital receiver
movie player needs to support spdif passthrough (dvd/bd players) and your receiver needs to support those DD/DTS codecs aswell, movies usualy have tons of audio codecs to select from, to maximise compatibility with audio receivers

PCM signal on optic is limited to stereo (coaxial spdif can run more channels uncompressed)
DD/DTS signal is limited to 5.1/7.1

for playin everything else you have two choices
1) selecting output device in windows setting as spdif-out
this will disable your sound card sound processing
no audio enhancements available from soundcard (sound core chip), only software tunning
2) selecting output device in windows settings as speakers
this will enable your soundcard sound processing
then you have to enable "play stereo mix to digital ouput" in sound blaster command, which you can find in digital playback settings