You sound card in your PC must have 6 seperate outputs (or 3 stereo pairs.)

Vegas does not stream AC3 encoded audio, but standard PCM data to the audio hardware.

How is your Sony reciever connected to your PC?

Peter

Thank you for your reply.

I have connected my computer with 3 stereo pairs to the six channel input on the amp, but I also connected the SPDIF via digital coax so that I can play dolby digital 5.1 and DTS encoded DVD's. The soundcard setup test is not sending AC3 encoded sound because until I connected the computer and the amp with the 3 stereo pairs the test didn't work.

Kelvin

This is what I'm concerned about because the help file states it like you are discribing, but those options are greyed out in the Preference/Audio Device and not there on the Surrond Mixer.

I wondering if this one of those things where Sony says that it works but oh! if you want to hear what your editing you need to spend the BIG $$'s.

My sound card does have different possibilities as to how it is connected.

Thanks for your reply,

Kelvin

The next thing to do is to click on the Master bus routind control in the Vegas mixer view and assure that all of the outputs are routed correctly.

Peter

You don't say what soundcard you are using, but from your description I'd guess that you have chosen an inappropriate Device Type in Options|Preferences|Audio Device for the drivers your soundcard provides.

Most decent soundcards will provide either MME/WDM or ASIO drivers which will allow you to select the appropriate outputs for the Rear and Centre/LFE pairs - you should choose either "Windows Classic Wave Driver" (for MME/WDM) or "ASIO" (for ASIO) to use the appropriate drivers for these cards.

But some low budget cards and most onboard audio chipsets (AC97, etc) do not provide decent multichannel MME/WDM (or ASIO) drivers so selecting "Windows Classic Wave Driver" (or "Microsoft Sound Mapper") will not allow you to use these devices in multichannel mode. Instead they only provide a multichannel driver written to a different standard called DirectSound. In order to use this kind of soundcard you need to make sure that you have selected "Direct Sound Surround Mapper" under Device Type - you will then typically find that the Rear and Centre/LFE selection boxes will be filled with appropriate choices (though you probably won't be able to alter them and they will still appear greyed out). I believe DirectSound drivers are not as good as either MME/WDM or ASIO in many respects (particularly as regards low-latency operation) - certainly none of the major soundcard manufacturers seem to bother with providing them for their serious soundcards. But if DirectSound divers are all your sound apparatus provides then they are what you will have to use (when you want to use the multichannel outputs at least).

If you'd like to let us know exactly what soundcard you are using someone here will probably be able to tell you exactly what settings you need to apply and where.

Mark

Mark,

Thank you for your reply.

You are right I have the onboard audio chipset AC97. When I select the audio device type to be "Microsoft Sound Mapper" the channel playback selections are grayed out with "Microsoft Sound Mapper" written in the boxes. The only other option I have to select for audio device type is "Window Classic Wave Driver", with this selected, the channel playback selections are grayed out with "Realtek AC97 Audio" written in the boxes.

When these selections are grayed out shouldn't it still work or do you have to specifically select the different channel locations/connections?

Is there anyway to add additional drivers? Even the "Direct Sound Surround Mapper"?

There is one other thing I have a question about and that is that my onboard sound card has a surround kit (a separate connection to the mother board) that included the SPDIF and the rear/center/sub (two stereo pairs). I can configure the sound card to use the surround kit or to use the mic and line in for the rear/center/sub out. Would this make any difference? I didn't think that it would matter because it works with other programs.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kelvin

I want to thank the guys on the forum, especially Mark for getting me to look on the web in the right direction.

I have downloaded a program called ASIO4ALL. It works great. I had to undo a few things that I tried previously, i.e. put the audio card driver back to the original driver, select the correct channels to the output then everything was up and running after that.

Thanks again,

Kelvin

Hmm, I'm not sure why you aren't seeing the DirectSound drivers offered as a possible choice under Device Type.

Just as an experiment I've quickly checked that it does work on my general purpose PC (I have a different machine for serious audio/video work) which happens to have an onboard Realtek AC97 chipset. I set up the Sound Manager like this and the Audio Device in Vegas like this and it all worked just fine.

I'll have a think and see if I can come up with any further suggestions.

Mark

Ah, jolly good.

I should have suggested ASIO4ALL as an alternative way of getting things to work if I'd been thinking clearly about your problem, but for some reason it never occurred to me (even though I've used ASIO4ALL quite a few times myself).

Glad you've found a solution now anyway.

Mark