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Topic: Virtual Surround on Windows 7 (Read 10983 times) previous topic - next topic
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Virtual Surround on Windows 7

On Windows XP I've been quite happy to figure out how to enable virtual surround in the driver of my Creative soundcard, it sounded much more convincing than the built-in stereo headphone output of many games. Enabling it was totally non-intuitive though, you had to set your speaker layout to 5.1 in the Windows audio settings (so programs would pass 5.1 audio to the driver) and set the layout to Stereo Headphones in the Creative Control panel (So the driver would know what you actually use) and enable Virtual Surround in another tab. The result was very good virtual surround sound for my favourite games.

Now I switched to Windows 7, which interestingly comes with a "Virtual Surround" setting in the provided by Windows, which is only available when you set the Windows speaker layout to stereo. Activating this and then setting the sound in e.g. Team Fortress 2 to 5.1 does not have the appropriate effect though. Sounds from behind the player have their bass stripped, and it doesn't sound convincing to me. Perhaps I am only hearing the front channels of actual surround output.

The Creative Control panel does not allow setting the speaker configuration seperately from the Windows setting anymore, apparently, so I really can't figure out how to get nice virtual surround on that system.

Does anyone know how to achieve what I'm after? If it's not possible anymore without extra software, is there e.g. a free effects driver for the Win7 sound system that provides this functionality (maybe just a wrapper for a dolby headphone dll, similar to the foobar plugin?) Help would be appreciated.

Virtual Surround on Windows 7

Reply #1 –
What model is the soundcard?

Virtual Surround on Windows 7

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Buckchoi on
What model is the soundcard?


Card is probably the wrong word, it's an USB X-Fi Surround 5.1 box. However, after some more messing around I managed to get it working on my own now. Apparently the speaker config settings from the Creative panel and the windows settings are not linked after all, I was probably just confused because there was a checkbox "Link to Windows setting" in the XP version that's gone now. I don't know how I got the impression that it's always linked now, maybe there was a bug in some beta driver I had used before or maybe I just made a mistake when I tried it earlier. It works fine now by enabling X-Fi CMSS 3d in the Creative panel, setting the config to Headphones there and setting it to 5.1 in the windows sound config.