Unable to get 5.1 sound on HDMI

I just bought a Aspire E5-571G-583R and I'm trying to get 5.1 sound from it. I've connected the laptop HDMI to my home theatre system which supports both Dolby Digital and DTS, not working. I've also tried to my LG LED-TV which supports Dolby Digital, that's also a no go. I've installed the latest Realtek drivers from your download pages (6.0.1.7250). The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it uses the Intel display sound driver instead of Realtek HD sound driver on the HDMI port. I have tried to change the driver on the HDMI device to Realtek but then I got the win 8.1 version of the BoD. So I guess I've two questions: 1. Is it possible to force the Realtek driver on the HDMI in order to get 5.1 sound? 2. If not, how do I get 5.1 sound from the laptop?

Accepted answers

anders_h

I really appreciate your efforts! However, I seem to have solve it. I manually updated the Intel drivers to the latest version from intel.com. That did the trick, almost :-)

Now I can choose 5.1 sound, and when I tested with Netflix I got 5.1 sound! The strange thing is that when I test the individuall speakers in the configuration menu the "test sound" in center, sub and sat all played in my two main "stereo" speakers. I can certainly live with that since all that really mathers to me is to be able to watch movies and such in 5.1.

All comments

-Justin

anders_h,

Sorry to hear you are having sound problems, let's try a couple things and see if we can get sound working for you. From what I understand, HDMI is "hot pluggable" and it should recognize the connection fairly quickly as far as video goes. If sound is only coming through the laptop and not going through the HDMI connection you can go to your sound options (Control Panel -> Sound). On the playback tab there should be a couple devices listed, one which should be HDMI.

Left click on that device and choose configure. It should take you through the configuration of that connection where you can set up your configuration. If you are going to constantly have it connected through HDMI you can also set it as the default device so it will always send audio through that connection and device.

anders_h

Thank you for your quick response!

Image 1 shows my current state. It's in swedish, but as you can see I have the HDMI device as my default sound output. By default it runs with the Inte display sound driver, which apperantly only supports 2.0 stereo. I've tried to manually change the driver to "High definition audio device". Then I got the result displayed in image #2. It says the device is unplugged.

I also tried to change the driver to Realtek, but that resulted in a blue screen of death.

I'v searched for updates for all drivers, both on intel.com, acer.com and so on but with no luck. I have used Intel driver update utilities in order to get other/newer driver but that doesn't work.

My current driver versions are:

High definition audio driver - 6.3.9600.16384

Realtek high definition audio - 6.0.1.7358

Image 1:

Image 2:

dump.PNG

dump2.PNG

-Justin

anders_h,

Thanks for the update, here is something else that we can try.

Unplug your HDMI cable, and if you have an audio cable, plug that in on your notebook's audio port and directly into the audio port on your TV/monitor, that should open the option to use the Realtek device for audio. Set the Realtek as the default play device and configure it for 5.1.

Plug the HDMI cable back in, video should display as normal, but sound should still process through that Realtek connection.

anders_h

And just to avoid misunderstandings, I do get the sound to my surround system but only in stereo.

anders_h

I really appreciate your help, but that is not a solution I can accept. First of all, I don't have a 3.5mm input with Dolby digital 5.1 support on my surround system. And second, the whole idea with hdmi is that it supports both full HD video and 5.1 audio.

anders_h

It's a brand new laptop, with quite up to date specs. As far as I can tell after hours of troubleshooting it's either the drivers from Aces that is all messed up, or my laptop is broken. I have connected a lot of different devices (laptops, xbox, sat receivers etc) to my surround system and there has never been any problems with this.

-Justin

anders_h,

Understood, let me do some research and see if I can't find a solution for you. I don't have a monitor handy to plug one of my notebooks in through HDMI at this time, but I'll work on something for you.

anders_h

For troubleshooting reasons I connected a audio cable in the 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack. The Realtek driver then let me choose how the jack should be used and I choose "Speaker output". Still, there was only stereo support and no option to choose 5.1 surround sound.

anders_h

Have been doing some research. The HDMI port is controlled by the Intel HD graphic chipset, in this case the 4th generation 4400 HD graphics controller. The Realtek chipset only controls the 3.5 mm jack and internal speakers. The 4400 Intel chipset supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS Premium Suite.

I've tried to install Intel native drivers, but that doesn't work as it tells me that I have to use drivers from the manufacturer. So, I think it's safe to say that the problem is the Acer drivers for Intel HD graphics.

IronFly

You can install Intel's drivers before uninstalling the Acer's version.

-Justin

anders_h,

I've did some research on this with a couple different units here to see if I could narrow this down for you. I don't have access to your exact unit, so I used a V3-571G and a VN7-571G and connected them to a 23" TV through HDMI.

I went into the NVidia control panel and set everything to use the GPU by default, rather than the Intel Display drivers, in hopes that HDMI would push through the GPU itself. It still pushed through the Intel graphics. Likewise, I had hoped when I changed everything over to the GPU it would maybe provide some extra sound options.

When I looked at the sound settings it was also Intel based sound, not RealTek, and there was no way for me to get he RealTek to be forced to the HDMI. Going through the configuration of both only gave me stereo option for sound, but on the next screen there was a check box for surround speakers that I could not click to see if it was an option.

I believe that this might be a limitation of the software and hardware setup on the unit at this point, because the two units that I used are doing the exact thing that yours is. I don't see any way to force anything to do what you are trying to do.

anders_h

I really appreciate your efforts! However, I seem to have solve it. I manually updated the Intel drivers to the latest version from intel.com. That did the trick, almost :-)

Now I can choose 5.1 sound, and when I tested with Netflix I got 5.1 sound! The strange thing is that when I test the individuall speakers in the configuration menu the "test sound" in center, sub and sat all played in my two main "stereo" speakers. I can certainly live with that since all that really mathers to me is to be able to watch movies and such in 5.1.

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