RCA surround on the PC

[Bucket]

I'm trying to get these 5.1 surround speakers to work on my PC. However, these are RCA surround speakers, the kind you put on a stereo system. The back speaker signal is sent through the stereo channels on a different frequency. It's not great, but it does the job and it was a convenient standard at one point. However, my on-board sound has outlets for Line Out, Rear Speaker and Center/Subwoofer separately. I'm using NMixer, by the way, and my motherboard is the NForce4 chipset.

All attempts to set up the speakers for 5.1 have been bleah. I can tell that a signal is being sent, as when it sends sound through the back channels, I can only just hear it through both front and back.

Is there any way, some program to download, that'll allow the computer to recognize or simulate the RCA surround system?

[david_a]

I assume by "RCA surround" you mean either Dolby Pro Logic 1 or 2. I don't know of any sound card that bothers to support those standards. For those of you curious, Pro Logic 1/2 work by encoding additional information into the L/R channels that is then decoded by the receiver and sent to the appropriate speaker (all in analog).

I assume you're using some type of receiver to power these speakers (otherwise you have a good possibility of damaging the speakers/soundcard) so you could check if it has an optical in. I think most NForce4 mobo's have an optical out. That might get you multichannel sound for stuff like DVDs, but games are a different matter... Read up on connecting a receiver to a PC (there's lots of resources for home-theater PCs); surround-sound on a PC is actually harder than it should be.