Thank you everyone, I can always count on Ars to provide amazing info on stuff I know little about. I'm really not an audio person. Just to give context, I'm mostly looking for surround sound for watching Netlix/Prime Video, and sometimes YouTube. Occasionally, I'd play a PC game, but that doesn't sound like a thing any more. Keep in mind, the last time I had a nice sound system connected to my PC, I was using a Hercules Fortissimo. lol. It supported Creative EAX
and Aureal A3D, so that was pretty awesome.
Maybe a motherboard thing? You haven't mentioned what you are using, so not much to go on.
Good point. Asrock DeskMini A300 with a Ryzen 5 3400G. This is the lowest end motherboard I've used in recent years, with a very budget AMD A300 chipset. I'm used to using AMD X-series chipsets with a lot more features. Sadly, I couldn't afford a DeskMini X300 which would have opened a lot more options for CPUs, but I did really want a compact system I could add my own HDDs and RAM to. It has three display outputs, two bays for 2.5" and two m.2 slots, so this system meets a lot of my other needs for an ultra compact system. This uses a motherboard form factor that's apparently called STX, so it's not a weird non-standard thing. One of the downfalls of this motherboard however is that it doesn't have a simple optical out, or the five surround jacks you get with a standard mATX/ITX motherboard. That type of setup has worked fine for me in the past.
Alternatively, you can use a receiver that takes multichannel analog input, and then drive it with your multichannel motherboard outs. This can be a pretty cheap solution if you buy used, because receivers that support multichannel RCA inputs are usually very old. In new receivers, that's usually an astonishingly expensive feature these days, because they limit it to the multi-thousand-dollar units.
Stick to stereo (perhaps with DPL2 or some faux-3d shaping that your receiver provides) or do the upgrades that everyone here is suggesting!
Unfortunately, no can do. I have effectively no budget. A modern receiver seems to be in the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars which just doesn't seem worth it. The receiver I'm using was virtually free, and given the age, that explains how cheap it was. It's a Yamaha RX-V793. It's so old that even though it supports DD 5.1, the user manual says basically while you can enjoy Dolby Pro Logic right now with 4.0 channels, some day soon, 5.1 content will hit the market and you can enjoy full 5.1 sound.
This is one of those early adopter devices that was so bleeding edge, it supported technology that wasn't really on the market yet. Like those early 720p HD CRT screens from before even DVD hit the market, and there was literally zero HD content to play. The more expensive parts of my system are two pairs of Edifier active monitors for fronts and surrounds (yeah, it's weird, this receiver supports line level outputs so you can connect normal powered computer speakers to it. Which is a feature I oddly need. lol), and parts of a Logitech PC surround sound system that I cannibalized for center and subwoofer. May not be the best things on the market, but the price was effective for what you get.
Was doing 7.1 on an AMD 6970 card over HDMI like over 10 years ago just fine...
OP needs to double check the basics before going into the weeds.
Probably. I didn't find something in the monitor that seems to fix it. It's an Asus VP28U monitor.
AFAIK, optical audio extractors are only for lossy prepackaged and anyone who says otherwise (and isn't selling an $800+ sound processing unit) is lying? So your extractor would be useless in this case. You're trying to do something that's impossible.
I dunno, seems to work with my PS5 and Series S. Game audio seems to be positional as expected. I also tried Fraunhofer's surround sound test on the Xbox's web browser, and signal came out of the expected speakers. But that's prerecorded content.
Maybe it won't work for PC? I feel like maybe PS5 and Xbox use licensed Dolby/DTS encoding hardware that PCs usually wouldn't have.
DVD/bluray player software on your computer will be able to offer up surround sound since the disc has a prepackaged antique soundtrack for that purpose. Nothing else will and your extractor won't help.
Surround sound for prerecorded content would mostly be ok, if I can't get surround for games.
www.startech.com
But I guess it makes sense, PC OEMs are not going to pay a license to Dolby or DTS, MS never did for Windows I guess, so that means your sound card manufacturer will.... and if that's who we're relying on for the license fee, it's not enough of an install base to make it worthwhile for game developers. But Sony and MS will pay for it for their console hardware, so every console game gets it for free.