I'm trying to get multichannel sound to work from my laptop to my surround sound system. I'm using a SIIG Soundwave 5.1 USB device to get an optical stream out, and feeding into the TOSLINK port on my preprocessor. The preprocessor claims to be able to handle DTS, AC3, Prologic2, and so on. My real goal is to be able to write code with openAL, to put sounds anywhere I want in the room. When that didn't work as expected, I reverted to just trying to play multichannel .wav files.
So far, all that's worked is some .wav files I found that were encoded, in prologic2. I get a surround sound effect from these, though it's not exactly jawdropping. (For all I can tell, the preprocessor is getting a stereo stream and synthesizing the other channels.)
.wav files claiming DTS encoding, gives white noise. .wav AC-3 gives some other kind of noise, much worse on the ears. The openAL code renders my sounds ok, but always in the front speakers, no matter how I position the source.
I get very decent multichannel effects from DVD and DVD audio, so I know this is possible with my audio preprocessor, but the DVD doesn't use the TOSLINK interface.
What I'm really asking is, how do I tell which component is screwing up. I'm having trouble believing Windows Media player could be so braindead as to not understand these files, but what do I know. (Foobar2000 doesn't seem to do any better). Maybe the SIIG USB device is doing something wrong, but I thought S/PDIF signals announced what sort of data they were sending, so whatever it's sending, the home theater processor should understand it. Right? Apparently not.
What would probably help is a set of multichannel .wav files that just did the usual channel tests ("left front.. right front.. center.. left surround.. right surround..") - anyone know of one? Or maybe a sledgehammer...