Vista - Digital out not working - been trying all day!

Right where to start, i bought a 5.1 home cinema system for the pure fact i wanted to playe the audio from my Acer 8920G through it. I have been using the normal head phone jack that is playing in stereo but i want to take advantage of Dolby Digital Live and listen to my music in surround sound. So i disabled the "speakers" through control panel in sounds and made the digital output the default but now there is no sound at all although vista says there is a signal when looking at the volume.

If i have not been specific enough then please feel free to aks questions, i feel like i am going mad, i can't be unique in ths situation... can i?

Thank You!

nope, this is not a unique situation, infact its a common misconception, digital out requires you to connect the surround into a digital audio output, not a jack, but a digital optical or S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format), which roughly means that unless you have a BNC adaptor for RCA or a toslink optical connection, you are not going to recieve digital audio. (as much as i hate wiki) to explain it better > S/PDIF - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thanks for the reply.

My Acer's digital output is combined with the 3.5mm headphone jack or so the instructions say. Is tere any other way i can get true 5.1 out of the headphone socket if i were to give up on the digital output. Or can i get a type of express card that would give me a digital output?
Thanks again

only by seperate jack outputs, for quadraphonic you can do it by 2 jacks, and for full surround, it can be done by 3 jacks

So can i get and express card that would let me do that? At the moment i cant see how i could do it even if i had that as i am pluging into the back of a DVD player that only has left and right, sorry if i am being a noob but this is driving me mad!

can yo do me a favour, can you take a pic of your jacks and audio inputs & outputs, would be greatful

Toga did you give tha manual for your laptop a good read. Looked it up on Acer's site and found this in it,





Sounds like you have done the first, but have you done the second? The jack works similar to the flex-jacks on X-Fi sounds cards and from the looks of it you need to make the settings changes in both places for the digital out to work.