AE-5 PLUS & Logitech Z906

[Quattro]

Hey everyone,

I hope everyone is good, I'm not sure if there's someone here who can help me? I know this forum is a little quiet these days, as are all forums unfortunately.
Is there someone out there with a Soundblaster AE-5 Plus and a Logitech Z906 speaker system? I'm quite computer literate but feel so lost with settings and outputs, do I use speaker output or optical digital, encoding on or off, what sound settings in windows, bitrate etc and then what input and effect/stereo settings to use on the Logitech controller itself? I use my computer for work video calls several times a day with, I use nvidia broadcast I think it helps, but I'm not sure what settings to use for GoogleMeets either sometimes I hear the system only playing background sounds and then I have to quickly fumble with the settings to get it to play the speakers voice which will only play through the center speaker, I would prefer it was all 3 or all 5 of the speakers ideally so I can hear clearly.

Would appreciate if someone could spare a few minutes and explain it to me so I can get the best out of what I've got. If you don't feel like typing out a bunch of stuff or screenshots we can jump on a googlemeet or zoom call if that's easier for you.

Thanks a lot!

 

[EarthDog]

I don't believe you'd need to change anything... the default settings should provide quality audio as it is.

The problem you're describing (hearing only background sounds) and solution (fumble with settings only plays through center speaker) sounds like an input problem...either the wrong port or it's set to the wrong mode.

 

[Quattro]

I spent time playing around with it today in a game that I know can make use of surround sound well, Forza 5, and I think I figured out what works best. In the Soundblaster Command turn on DTS encoding, set Windows output to Speakers (not optical out), set the input on the Logitech speaker controller to input3 (optical digital??) and the 'decode' light comes on and generally the sound is awesome. Very good use of surround and the way it uses the subwoofer is really excellent, pretty happy with that.

For Spotify though, presumably because it does not output in surround/multi channel what seems to sound the best is switch the input on the Logitech controller to input3 (speaker 3.5mm jack), but don't touch the output in windows, and then change the stereo effect to 4.1, I presume this would be the same case for YouTube as that doesn't output in multi channel.

Had two minor issues though in gaming, once it totally ignored the rear right speaker and another time it seemed to be muffling the center speaker, but I think that was a game issue or a Windows11 issue, I reset the game and it worked fine again.
Maybe someone in future will search for a similar question and find this thread.

I was pretty happy with the onboard audio on the Asus VIII Crosshair Hero motherboard but the soundcard is clearer and more defined, so glad I upgraded to that.

 

[Quattro]

.....and now for some reason the Dolby encoder doesn't work any more...
<sigh>