I decided to take advantage of boxing day sales last Christmas and picked up the Logitech Z906 speaker system. Noticed these bad boys had a number of different types of audio input connectors so I went out and purchased a TOSLINK (Toshiba Fiber Optic audio) cable and hook it up to my computer that way. I’ve never played with a multi-speaker setup, nor fiber optic audio cables.
After getting everything unpacked and hooked up, I noticed that the computer could NOT send multi-speaker output unless the stream was dolby encoded. So all games, applications, and software that supported multi-speaker output could not take advantage of the speakers, UNLESS it used dolby audio.
In order to get multi-speaker working, I had to use the traditional set of 3-4 X 3.5inch stereo cables. When using this output, games (including Counter Strike), apps, etc… could now use the multi-speaker output.
Just thought I’d write this up in case it saves someone some time. I spend over a day trying to find out why I was having these issues. P.S. In the end, I still use TOSLINK as I find the audio quality way better, even though it is in fact just stereo (2 speakers).
You could use a sound card with Dolby live! like a SB Xfi and convert the streams to digital.
The funny thing is that the conversion is done using just the cpu and not the soundcard, so this is a marketing and licensing issue and not a technology problem.