morty343

TRA will only produce two-channel stereo sound for me. I've done a few searches and it looks like most people say it does 5.1, but it seems a few others are having the same problem as me.

I just got the game DVD from amazon and loaded it on my HTPC which has a PCI Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Music card in it and is running WinXP 32bit with all the latest drivers. (There is also an HTDV Wonder card in the system, which has an audio capture device, but I do not know how this could affect the X-Fi. And the video card is an HIS 4670, which has onboard HDMI audio, but it is disabled in device manager.) The HTPC is connected to my home audio amp via SPDIF coax/Dolby Digital Live. All other games produce 5.1 surround including some older than TRA, like Thief 3. So this tells me it is not an issue with the Dolby Digital Live conversion. Also I have TR Underworld installed (via Steam) and it produces 5.1 surround.

My HTPC also has onboard audio with DDL (realtec 882 I think) so as a test I enabled it and tried using it instead of the X-fi, but still nothing from the rear/center speakers. (At this point the reaktek is disabled in BIOS.) I can "fake" surround sound by using CMSS-3D or the like, but it's just not the same.

I've double checked my settings in the device control panel as well as the Windows speaker settings.

Through some Google searches I saw that Eidos tech support has basically blown off some people who are using newer Creative cards but who are not getting surround in TRA, telling them the game isn't marketed as "guaranteeing" surround. But again, from what I can tell there are other people using newer cards like the X-fi and have no problems, so it looks like Eidos just doesn't want to really address the issue.

So I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this and solved it, and how. Or I'm wondering if the game isn't really true 5.1 capable, instead only basic L/R stereo, which some people seem to have suggested.