Asus P5E-VM HDMI sound setup

[biff]

I'm using the digital coax out to a receiver and can't figure out how to get 5.1 going - set at 2 channel right now. The manual shows a nice picture for setup but when I follow that I see nothing like what it shows both with the software that was on the CD as well as what I DL'ed from Asus. I've been looking through all that and what I could find in the control panel and no luck. Can anyone throw me a hint where I can find it? ...unless the digital coax can only do two channel on this mobo which I doubt.

[biff]

nevermind... I think this is a no go. I just found a bit on intel's site that says spdif is spdif is limited to 2 channels.... or 6 channels compressed. Bummer!

[lowfat]

6 channels over SPDIF is always compressed. From what I've read so far the ALC883 that the P5E-VM uses does support Dolby Digital Live if that is what you are looking for.

[biff]

I did end up getting it going actually. Oddly it wasn't in the soundcard setup/drivers. I tried setting the audio output in TMT to 5.1 - which would make sense to me - and that didn't work but setting it to SPDIF did get the 5.1 working eventhough it was already using the SPDIF as the output anyway and the soundcard setting still says 2 channel. No wonder I had trouble finding the correct settings. TBH it sounded pretty good even though it's obviously a compressed format. I think I'll enjoy my ignorance for now until I can get a proper output and decoder setup for uncompressed audio. I've been eyeing this for a while now, I guess this just made up my mind.

BTW do you know what the format is for compressed? Do they just cut back the bit depth?