Windows 11 surround 5.1 doesn't work on the back channel

i have some update

i tried to trobleshooting with asus support directly, even deleting the driver "manually" and deleting them with their home made script and then reinstalling them with their special driver version.

Nothing changed ... the speaker fill in sonic studio 3 still doesn't work and the sonic studio audio effects doesn't work. can be buggy, but, the last test that i need to do is a sadly fresh reinstall.

if then still doesn't work it can be 2 things. defective motherboard or buggy audio drivers. (the 5.1 in vlc or games like cyberpunk 2077 works perfectly, but the sonic studio audio effects don't)

they suggested to unplug avery ssd and hhd and then connect a new hhd and make a clean install.

in my sistem i have a m.2 between a giant grafic card and a cooling tower, on it is the OS win 11 ... so ... to remove it, its really annoing because i need to dissaseble half of the pc ... :(

i was thinging at this point, it's better to wipe the m.2 and make a clean install or unplug everything and test it with a clean install? win11 is really annoying when you install it because it's asking you to log in with the microsoft account. and then reinstall all the SW... :(

I understand, and I truly hope there's another solution. Nonetheless, I'm leaving the comment here since I'm glad I could fix it at least for chrome and hopefully other people could find it useful.

I hope this helps someone. Unfortunately, answers.microsoft.com is mostly a failure on answers 99% of the time and we end up searching other forums.

Those chrome flags don't do anything except telling chrome not to touch the audio stream in any way and let the audio driver do "speaker fill", which is exactly what I was talking about.

Here is the precise moment when Chrome added some of these flags and the explanations in the thread why they don't work sometimes (because the audio driver either lied about the number of channels in wasapi mode or that the audio driver doesn't have "speaker fill" or that the audio driver's "speaker fill" is buggy).

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=479057

So those flags MAY fix some of the symptoms, but they don't actually fix the actual issue.

Hello,

If anyone on the web encounters this problem, I want to share the fix that worked for me:

Fix for Chrome: Added the following command on the google chrome shortcut:

"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-audio-output-resampler --try-supported-channel-layouts --disable-features=AudioServiceOutOfProcess

These are other options that I have seen worked for other people but none of this worked if only used individually so I ended up trying to combine the 3 options above.

--try-supported-channel-layouts

--force-wave-audio

--disable-audio-output-resampler

--disable-features=AudioServiceOutOfProcess

--disable-audio-output-resampler

I also ensured that my output speakers is configured to be using the right settings as 5.1 surround by going to mmsys.cpl>select your speakers>configure speakers>5.1 or 7.1 surround. Click next and so on.

I hope this helps someone. Unfortunately, answers.microsoft.com is mostly a failure on answers 99% of the time and we end up searching other forums.

the 5.1 works perfectly with:

netflix windows 11 app

vlc

steam games for example cyberapunt 2077