5.1 Surround Sound Solution

[Zerocoil]

Well good day to all

I am in need of some advise on how to achieve 5.1 surround sound.

I recently upgraded my PC from:

Asus M5A99X Evo

FX-8320

Gigabyte GTX 1660 Super 

 

to:

PRO B550M-P GEN3

Ryzen 5 5600

MSI MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 12GB

 

With the old Asus motherboard it had a digital\optical audio out which i connected to my Samsung 5.1 home theater system achieving some good sound with some of my games that do support 5.1. Needless to say I did not do my research and when I got my new rig setup I realized that the new motherboard does not have a digital\optical audio out and had to settle for 3.5mm jack to RCA (Stereo only)  .

My home theater system does not have a HDMI in port that I can utilize for audio in and have tried a HDMI audio extractor connected to my 3060.

This solution had its drawbacks and did not work.

 

Are there any suggestions on how I am able to achieve 5.1 sound?

[mariushm]

Cheapest option would be to get a USB or pci-e x1 sound card 

 

example of usb sound card : https://www.ebay.com/itm/266688052101

 

example of pci-e x1 card : https://www.ebay.com/itm/225814286538

 

but check if there's drivers for it first. 

 

The thing with sound cards is that most people are fine with onboard audio so the cheap pci-e x1 stuff is mostly older PCI audio chips that are made to run on pci-e x1 through a pci-e to pci bridge chip which most of the time works fine, but sometimes there's quirks with this, and you end up with glitches or problems when the card wakes up from standby/sleep etc etc 

Also some chips won't have windows 11 or even windows 10 drivers so you have to verify before that the card is supported in your windows.

 

The one linked above seems to be native pci-e x1 so newer and probably has win10 drivers

[Psittac]

One option is to get the SybasonicDAC and use it's spdif out

 

Whether that is capable of a 5.1 output I'm unaware as it's a 2ch dac/amp.  But that would require further research.  I was just going off of @mariushm's idea of adding a piece of hardware to achieve what your old mb did.

 

Also congrats on the space age upgrade, legit ballin!

[Omon_Ra]

Snag one of these. USB to Toslink. No drivers, plug and play. I knew this was an issue with my new build and is the easiest/cheapest solution. I use optical to my AV receiver and it works fine. Win11 only sees a stereo device, but depending on the content it still passes through 5.1 surround to my receiver.