Solved! Creative sound blaster Z, surround headphones and 2.0 speakers

[sam.luijben]

Hi everyone,

I used to own a asus Xonar DGX sound card which supported dolby headphones. I have an 5.1 astro a40 and i was not getting the best quality using this soundcard since it needs dolby digital live (ddl).

So i decided to get the Creative sound blaster Z, which is a card that does support DDL. Im really happy with the directional sound quality. It is much better then my recent Asus card.

But here's the but.. sometimes i want to channel the sound through both my Astro's as well as through my speakers at the same time. I was previously able to do this on my asus card. The sound was crap through my speakers since is was encoded for direction but that was fine. On my creative card however, it seems to be impossible to get two channels at the same time. My question is then: is there a way to get my creative card to send two signals (one for my speakers and one for my headset).

P.s. my astro is hooked up to my soundcard by an optical cable (spdif). My speakers are a simple aux cable plugged into the headphone jack on the back of my soundcard.

Personally i was thinking to place a optical splitter on the optical output of my soundcard. One of the cables will feed my Astro's and i'll use the other for my stereo. The stereo optical port has to be converted to a simple aux jack. For this I'll use a converter that converts optical to aux. Can anyone confirm if this will work, or does anyone have any suggestions.

Thank you all very much in advance.

Kind regards,

Sam

 

[dinopht]

You may want to disable the Dolby Digital Live encoder on the Sound Blaster Z then go to the Advanced Features tab of the Sound Blaster Z Control Panel application and check on "Play stereo mix to digital output".

Checking on the option, "Play stereo mix to digital output" will allow the Sound Blaster Z to output audio through the 3.5mm audio output ports and the optical output port at the same time.

It is recommended to connect the speakers to the speakers output jack to the speakers output port instead of the headphones output port as the headphones output port may get damaged after playing through the speakers for some time.

You do not have to worry about the not having amplification on the audio output as the speakers have built-in power amplifiers.

Om Mani Padme Hum