I recently bought and installed windows vista (with a great load of effort) on my old xp machine. I have a 5.1 speaker system. When i used xp all my tracks played beautifully over winamp/media player etc but now that i have vista i had a few problems:

1) Sub-woofer didn't work (fixed after hours of searching through new [albeit totally useless] settings).

2) Some of my tracks won't play in the rear speakers AT ALL (other 4 chanels are fine)

3) Those tracks that do work; sounds much like when you hit the "voice cancellation" button (only in the rear speakers). also slight echo/delay thing.

I have a realtek AC'97 sound card with the newest vista drivers installed...

Thanks

Check the options in Winamp and WMP to see what audio output device/settings they're using. Vista uses a completely different audio architecture from XP (per-application volume control, etc.), so the settings may not have carried over very well.

Uhh yeah i've tinkered with all the options in winamp; speaker fill, direct sound, i tried using software acceleration as oppsed to hardware coz that's what the winamp tech guys suggested but no help... I'm pretty sure its some or other weird setting started by vista to "enhance audio-visual experience" that no-one can find out how to disable....

Uhh thanks for the time but i think going back to xp while i wait for some other person to develop a solution is my best bet... Vista is disappointing anyway - not worth the cash BG asks anyway...

Or maybe your hardware's just old. Or the drivers are bad (AFAIK these are usually written by the hardware vendor). Not everything is the operating system's fault.

Vista's not an upgrade OS. But then again, few OSes upgrade without some issues. It works quite perfectly on machines that ship with it, so most issues are usually either related to updating to it from XP or installing it on a machine that didn't ship with it.

I've had the pleasure of using it on a brand new PC that shipped with it (not mine) and I can tell you that it runs really well with no problems. Notably absent are most of the reported issues I've heard of.

KK i see your point. I guess thisisn't the best place to bitch about vista or anything. Its all 2006 hardware and i didn't upgrade its a fresh installation.

Uhm as an update for anyone who is having a problem with limited range occurring in rear speakers it has been confirmed to me that this IS a new feature in Windows Vista gone wrong ("full range satellites" option not enabling correctly), but is not currently (disable-able?) and i will report back when a solution is created...

Just try listen closely to a rear speaker in your vista system and you might see what i mean....

Well I don't have a Vista machine, so I can't comment on that. However it has been reported that Windows Updates have been playing havoc with Realtek hardware in general, so you might want to check that out. MS has posted a hotfix for it, however.

hmm yeah i've heard of the hotfix but im struggling to find it, do you maybe have a link? coz I can't get vista to automatically download ALL appropriate hotfixes. I have unlimited cap so i really doesn't bother me if it downloads the whole lot...

Check the MS support website.

I found a workaround:
Enable "environment" and set as "room"
Enable "speaker fill"
Enable "room correction" but leave all distances as 0
Enable "bass management".

All of this allows vocal frequencies in rear speakers but there is still a very slight (but still annoying) delay (echo)

Thanks for all your help. I have been told by MS engineer people that in Vista SP1 (Early Q3) the bug will be fixed.

If you have a "distance" entry you can type into in room correction, you've got some non-Vista APO loaded doing the room correction. The Vista-supplied room correction asks you to hold a mike in a specific way and calculates things for you, you don't have to enter anything.

It sounds very much like you've got somebody else's (vendor's) UI there, and that it's not working right.

5.1 working fine in Vista with Audigy 2 ZS. All I had to do was run the audio wizard, choose 5.1, speakers tested ok, surround speakers work fine on 5.1 audio recordings.