Vista - HT Omega & Neo:PC 5.1 Upmix

After a recent new build—my first in nearly 5 years of random upgrades to my old PC—I decided to forego the customary Creative sound card for something of higher quality. I would have just used my Audigy ZS2 Platinum with this build but the evil folks at Creative don't care about the promises of decent Vista drivers they made when I bought the card. So far I've been happliy using it on my workstation at work with the kX Drivers, which are small, solid and have very flexible DSP access.

After reading many favorable reviews I got the HT Omega Striker 7.1, it sounds great but I have a few issues.

My first is that I can't get the Neo:PC upmix to work. I've set the System Input to 2ch and the analog Output Mode to 6ch. I clicked the Neo:PC button in the DSP panel but I'm not hearing anything out of the rear or center speakers. Only the subwoofer is outputting anything and this is because the speakers have a low-pass filter sending everything below a certain frequency to the sub.

I've tested the speakers using the windows utility and each speaker is plugged in correctly and works.

The other DSP effects have only worked on occasion and I've not ruled out why they do not work.

If anyone has any ideas I would be grateful!

Vista sound settings had it trying to output at 16(bit)/96(khz), changing to 16/48 fixed it, all DSP effects are now working including the Neo:PC stuff. Sweet.

The most you will be able to do using any HT Omega Card on Vista, is 24/48 in the Vista Sound Settings. I have the bit rate set to 24bit and the Hz set to 48 in the Vista Sound Settings, and my card works really great. I have the HT Omega Claro. I use Dolby Pro Logic IIx decoding all the time.

I'll give you a hint of what's coming in an upcoming driver release on the HT Omega Claro, and I basically got an answer from the horses mouth at HT Omega, which in this case is one of there employee's. Xear 3DEX, which is known as DS3DGX on the ASUS Zonar cards, which restores 5.1 sound for a lot of games to Vista is coming in an upcoming driver release, possibly the next driver release for the Claro and Claro plus later this year.

The HT Omega Striker driver already has Xear 3DEX in it's drivers.