No surround sound options with up-to-date WIndows 11 on Realtek or Sound Blaster Z se

Okay. So I abandoned this post as it seemed to be going in weird directions and replies had a disturbingly hostile feel to what I THOUGHT was a simple request for help on something that should have been relatively straightforward. Although I do appreciate the time spent in replies to my post, there seems to have been an attack on my 'ignorance' in digital audio rather than dealing with quirky Windows settings. I have spent time researching the various encoding modes (i.e, Dolby), but have not preferred any specific one over the other. I just wanted to get Windows to output surround sound!!!

I may also add that the issue was resolved, and in typical kludgy Microsoft fashion, toggling the setting 'Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device' from ON to OFF and back ON again resolved the issue, as suggested elsewhere. I have been afraid to come back here and mark this issue as resolved.

As a high-school student I do not teach, nor can I afford professional equipment. I DO own a reasonably high performance machine that I use for 3D animation and digital music production. My 5.1 editing tools are integrated into my video editing suite. Since getting the surround sound working, I have tested music and sound synchronization with motion in the 5.1 environment and all seems to work well. No problems there.

I do use sound effects that fall into the Low Frequency Effects range and the animations that I produce would benefit from surround sound. My sound effects are digitally generated and/or processed to achieve the desired result.

Thank-you again for the time and effort that you have put into this post!

Exactly. It seems that we have come full circle with this question. We installed the Sound Blaster early on as it quickly became apparent that the Realtek was not an option and has been out of the equation for some time. The Sound Blaster provides the necessary encoders and seemed to have been a suitable solution. We followed all instructions to the letter, including selecting the speakers, NOT the surround as default.

Regardless of what we do, there is no option for 5.1 surround in any settings dialog. There are various resolution and bit-rate settings for stereo, but no options for surround in any settings, device manager or system settings, for surround. We only output stereo through the optical. My request for help was how to enable the surround settings.

This machine being dual-boot, we booted into Manjaro Linux. The sound card was immediately picked up and within minutes we were playing video with 5.1 audio. The audio settings dialog provided a list of audio formats, and it was just a matter of selecting the the appropriate 5.1 and encoding from the list. Windows does not give any options other than stereo. Unfortunately the software we are using runs on Windows only.

The settings below show 24-bit selected, but we have tested at the lower resolution 16 bits as well without success.

Much of what you said is understood, and we do understand that there are limitations. Our setup would be used for high-school level editing, so we should be okay. But it seems that you might have missed the point - The Netflix app DOES provide 5.1 audio, we have confirmed this - Windows just won't let us select 5.1 for the audio device. The Sound Blaster Command app provides the Dolby and DTS support required to encode the audio.

You missed the entire line of reasoning.

Netflix paid Dolby a license fee to use Dolby Digital in the Netflix app (and only inside the Netflix app). This is why Netflix specifically tells you that 5.1 is not supported in a browser.

This is similar to 20 years ago when you bought a DVD burner that came with OEM version of WinDVD (which WinDVD paid Dolby a license fee for Dolby Digital) on your Windows XP computer. Windows XP never let you select 5.1 optical. You can only play 5.1 optical when you play a DVD disc with WinDVD in Windows XP.

Nothing's changed. In the last 20 years, only windows 7 has built-in DVD player (and thus free dolby digital). The rest of the 17 years, you have to buy the windows media center editions.

This is why you can NEVER be able to select 5.1 optical on Realtek on your Dell computer --- because you didn't pay for it, Dell didn't pay for it, Microsoft didn't pay for it. But somebody needs to pay Dolby money.

You have to enable sound blaster as your default speaker (not sound blaster optical) and then turn on dolby digital live. Then your receiver should tell you that the receiver is getting 5.1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8djKvPl6jro

Latency may be a problem for your setup.

You need dolby digital in order to have 5.1 with optical. Realtek doesn't include dolby digital in their chipset. Which means that Dell has to pay for it. DVD is obsolete so no computer manufacturer is going to pay for dolby digital on a 2023 computer.

If you play a 5.1 movie on the windows netflix app, you will get 5.1 optical because netflix paid for dolby digital in their windows app. This is also the reason why netflix will tell you that they don't have 5.1 optical in a browser.

Sound Blaster Z SE has dolby digital live for games. Games will output 5.1 analog audio. Then Sound Blaster Z SE will then re-encode all the analog audio to dolby digital.

I have zero knowledge of how this thing is supposed to work. But if it is similar to how dolby digital live is used for games, then your DAW should output 5.1 analog. Then you let sound blaster z se re-encode your 5.1 analog to dolby digital live and then send it via sound blaster z se's optical out. This part you can ask gaming forums to see how exactly this gaming setup should work.

And don't use some super high bitrate.

Your setup is not meant to do 5.1 audio editing. Even if it works, latency is going to be a problem.

Nobody is going to be able to help you as we don't know a single thing about professional audio and DAW stuff. And professionals will laugh at you if you go to a professional audio forum looking for help.

Much of what you said is understood, and we do understand that there are limitations. Our setup would be used for high-school level editing, so we should be okay. But it seems that you might have missed the point - The Netflix app DOES provide 5.1 audio, we have confirmed this - Windows just won't let us select 5.1 for the audio device. The Sound Blaster Command app provides the Dolby and DTS support required to encode the audio.