Asus Xonar SE : No surround on optical output

[brumster]

Hey peeps,

Have logged this with Asus but I don't hold out a lot of hope, so in the meantime thought I'd try here.

Had an Asus Xonar D2X for years that worked fine until the semi-obligatory upgrade to Windows 10. D2X has no official drivers and the unofficial ones I tried were awful with broken-up audio so... ok... new sound card time.

Bought a Xonar SE 5.1 card, installed, drivers updated and connected up to my Logitech Z-5400 speaker system. However I cannot get any surround audio out of the optical output. The logitech supports both DTS and Dolby encoding and if I go into the sound control panel, the SPDIF output on the card has the "Configure" button greyed out so there are no settings I can set for it to tell it stereo/5.1/7.1 etc.

Now, if I bring up the properties on that output, select supported formats, and perform the play test on either DTS audio or Dolby Digital, I get sound output. The display on my logitech front-end alsoc onveniently displays details of the encoding it is receiving - and it correctly displays DTS or Dolby accordingly - so I know that, at some level, it is working.

However, this is the ONLY location/mechanism where I can seem to get surround playing out of the card! Any other method - games, suitably-encoded films or test videos they all just play in stereo. The speakers do not receive an encoded stream. A good test I use is here :

https://www2.iis.fraunhofer.de/AAC/multichannel.html

I download them and play them through VLC just to ensure the web browser or standard windows media player are limitations. All of them, without exception, come out as just plain stereo. No discrete surround output.

Initially I suspected that the card was incorrectly advertised and was incapable of 5.1 audio on the optical output, but the test above proves that wrong because clear the card CAN output both DTS and DD on the optical output.

Any ideas? Trying to narrow this down to an Asus problem or a Windows 10 issue!?

 

[james.miller]

As far as I know, the SE doesn't support DTS interactive or DDLive, which means no multi channel over spdif unless you are playing something with an encoded soundtrack, which the test samples are.

I see you don't get the correct format with movies either, I'm not sure what the issue is there. Are you sure the drivers are correctly installed as you haven't posted any screenshot of the actual driver UI?

You should give the d2x another try, I've been using the uni drivers for years with my d2, works fine in Windows 10

 

[brumster]

As far as I know, the SE doesn't support DTS interactive or DDLive, which means no multi channel over spdif unless you are playing something with an encoded soundtrack, which the test samples are.

I see you don't get the correct format with movies either, I'm not sure what the issue is there. Are you sure the drivers are correctly installed as you haven't posted any screenshot of the actual driver UI?

That's exactly what flumoxes me assuming Windows plays some simple encoded WAV that it has stored somewhere, that implies the driver and card are capable of passing through an encoded stream to the optical out, which then (as you say) begs the question why it doesn't work the movies. Maybe the card doesn't support passthrough but then, how on earth is it correctly doing the test sounds !?

UI looks like this. Nothing in there very complicated compared to the old UI I was used to (no DSP, effects, not even a virtual speaker shifter)...

You should give the d2x another try, I've been using the uni drivers for years with my d2, works fine in Windows 10

Hmmm maybe. Problem I had there was sometimes it would get it's knickers in a twist and just output garbled static over the 'real' audio...

What UI did you use? The provided Asus one, none of the features worked (speaker shift, DSP, effects, equaliser) for me - did you use one of the other recommended ones?

 

[Marsman]

Playback software being used, or some configuration setting may also have some impact on why films with DTS and DD tracks are not being passed on to the external decoder unit.

As James has said, Xonar SE doesn't have either DTS Connect or Dolby Digital Live, like the D2/X does. One or the other is needed to encode the audio stream when playing games, so that it can be decoded externally as 5.1.

If you can't get the D2X to work properly, then you could just use the direct 5.1 analogue 3.5mm outputs, assuming the Z5400 has that, as the Z5500 does.

From a gaming perspective, Dolby or DTS encoded audio is not doing anything that won't get with direct 5.1.

 

[brumster]

I'll try it - that is a fallback option but then, to just be totally honest with you - if I have to resort to analogue outputs for surround on a card with optical output I'll be a bit annoyed. Maybe I should have read the fine print a little more but it would help is Asus make it clear that 5.1 is only available over the analogue outputs . I feel that's borderline misleading on the marketing side. Ok, maybe I should have picked it up that it didn't offer encoding but... meh, marketing small print !!

 

[b00merang69]

I assume you can play older DD (AC3) and DTS but not the newer codecs like DD+ (E-AC3) on Netflix same as myself but I can recode them as my ZxR (Logitech Z906 speakers) does support that function.

That is the limitation of Optical, you need HDMI for those.

 

[brumster]

Well, I took it up with Asus support and after several days of to'ing and fro'ing, checking drivers, control panel settings, etc. they basically said the card was faulty and to RMA it :-/

I'm not entirely convinced myself but can I just call out props to OcUK for a no-quibble returns process. Will send it back, get a refund and then try another card, most likely a creative (will do a bit of research on which ones can do pass-through of encoded streams to optical output). Will report back when I find a winner

 

[Marsman]

Soundblaster Z, certainly does both DTSC ad DDL. Not sure if there are any cheaper cards that offer one or the other. SB Z, is the cheapest that does both.

 

[brumster]

Oddly, I just came to the same conclusion and have just ordered one ! Thanks for your help

 

[something daft already!!]

I just bought the soundblaster zx.

It's not been a good experience. It keeps dropping the DTS or Dolby every so often, causing blips in the sound and loss just for a moment via SP/Dif. I am currently in conversation with Creative and they sent me a patch to try. When I finish work I'll try it and post if it works.

Non 5.1 works perfectly without a glitch, but that's not why I just shelled out £100 for it.

 

[b00merang69]

Same drivers as the ZxR and I have no issues with those over optical (Optical is on the Daughter Board), could be your cable or whatever its connected to.

 

[something daft already!!]

Same drivers as the ZxR and I have no issues with those over optical (Optical is on the Daughter Board), could be your cable or whatever its connected to.

I swapped this card for an Asus Xonar which worked flawlessly for years until they stopped updating drivers in 2015. I never had a drop of dts with that card. They sent me a patch, well it was a registry update. The audio has not dropped since I installed it. Been testing for half an hour now and no drops. It would have dropped by now. Fingers crossed this has fixed it.

This may help others and I will add this post to my thread on the subject.

 

[b00merang69]

Just curious as never heard of this fix and not needed it as you may know they nuked their forum after it was hacked.

The latest driver is recent (To fix latest Win 10 issues) but before that was ancient.

 

[something daft already!!]

Yeah I saw that older driver and also tried that just in case it would help but it didn't. The reg fix seems to have done the trick so I'm happy. TBH I got the card super cheap as it was an open box unit. Someone had removed the LEDs though so I was concerned about it. I got an extra £15 off due to the LED issue, at the time when I reported it to the retailer, I didn't know they were actually missing. Only later when I whipped off the shroud to see if I could solder a fix, did I see they were not there.

 

[brumster]

Just to report in, but Soundblaster Z installed, control panel configured, and DTS signal recognised by my logitechs and surround sound coming through. So all is good in the world

As an added bonus, the annoying "audio activation delay" that seems to aflict the Asus cards has disappeared too - the Soundblaster seems to keep the audio signal over SPDIF permanently activated rather than going into "sleep" mode, so sound comes out instantly without missing the first few tenths of a second of audio.