No Dialogue with 5.1 Surround Sound DVD Playback

[climbtek]

Hi,

I'm running an Altec Lansing FX5051 5.1 Surround Sound system with my PC. However, when I try to playback commercial DVD's through Windows Media Center, I can tell that I have the 5.1 surround sound, but all I hear is the movie's music and background audio. All major dialogue is severely muted and I can only barely hear it if I have my ear pressed against the speakers. Is there a problem in my configuration??

Thanks

[Hi Ho]

Originally Posted by climbtek Is there a problem in my configuration??

Yes. Your center channel is not working. Why? I don't know. Virtually all of the dialog comes from the center channel. If THESE are the speakers you have then the speakers have a built in sound card and theoretically they *should* be working.

Did you install any kind of driver/control panel for the speakers? What version of Windows are you running?

[memarti002]

Originally Posted by climbtek Hi, I'm running an Altec Lansing FX5051 5.1 Surround Sound system with my PC. However, when I try to playback commercial DVD's through Windows Media Center, I can tell that I have the 5.1 surround sound, but all I hear is the movie's music and background audio. All major dialogue is severely muted and I can only barely hear it if I have my ear pressed against the speakers. Is there a problem in my configuration?? Thanks

Hi Climbtek,

I had exactly the same issue. . . 5.1 Surround, I could Play DVDs in windows media, but the dialogue track was muffled. I'd read in other forums that it was the center channel as well, and to make sure it wasn't the speaker I swapped the cables on my receiver, but it didn't fix anything. I ran my surround sound setup and all the speakers functioned as expected, including the center channel. Playing music and TV works fine, just DVDs have an issue. If I played it in another player it would work fine. It's really odd. My sound system has a volume control that sits on my desk with a button called "Matrix". I don't know what that button is for, but when I turn it off the audio works fine in windows media. It does something with the center chanel I guess. It's still strange that the issue is only in windows media player and windows media center though. If anyone else can figure out why these particular programs are targeted I'd love to know what's going on.

[memarti002]

Originally Posted by memarti002 It's still strange that the issue is only in windows media player and windows media center though. If anyone else can figure out why these particular programs are targeted I'd love to know what's going on.

Just a note . . . My research pulled up some info on matrix surround technology, which appears to be an older surround technology (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=341486). This article has some info. It indicates that movies were filmed with 4 channels of sound for the surround effect, but the technology we had for watching it at the time only had room for 2 audio channels, so Dolby fixed it so that when you play the movie back, you could take those 2 channels and turn them back into 4. Apparently "Matrix" creates it's own center channel feed by identifying what ever is identical in the left and right channels and saying "this is center". It seems like Media player already has this seperated out though, so that the center channel plays the majority of the dialogue sound and just a little of that sound is fed through the left and right channels. This means if your surround is using Matrix, it's ignoring that center channel that Media Center is sending out and trying to make it's own by taking the little bit of dialogue sound that's left over in the left and right channels and trying to say "this is center".