I have a brand new Aurora 4 that arrived friday.

Should mention that it kernal panicked immediately out of the box.

But I got past that and updated all the drivers and stuff and got it working just fine with the cheap stereo speakers I had sitting around.

Last night I hooked up an optical cable to the SPDIF out of the XFi titanium that came with my order, swapped to that output in the mixer panel and enabled it. Stereo sound was all that would come out.

The driver appears to be permanently set on 2.1 speakers. Nothing I do can get it to allow me to tell it that I have 5.1

I am no dummy, I recognize that Bluray movies have Dolby Digital Live and DTS tracks on them and those can be set to send out to my receiver just fine. But for games you need to have the computer capable of turning the output into a stream that the receiver recognizes. And the XFI SHOULD do that, but the first step to doing so is to tell it you actually have it connected to a 5.1 capable system

This thread seems to show that Asus Republic of Gamers are having the same problem but I don't see it on Alienware owner radar anywhere:
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?13051-GET-FULL-SupremeFX-X-Fi-MB2-EXPERIENCE-including-Optical-OUT-5.1

Any clues on this?

Also my understanding is that there is no seperate codec purchase needed for Titanium XFI, is that not true?

http://buy.soundblaster.com/_creativelabsstore/cgi-bin/pd.cgi?page=product_detail&category=Software&pid=F2222DDN6Z2H2ADDEZD

If not that solves it fast for $5, but I thought it came with it.

I am assuming your sound card is a separate card and not integrated into the motherboard. If it is separate, I would contact Alienware support and see if that was a software that should have been included. The system should utilize 5.1 through SP/DIF. Only a motherboard as old as the one in my i7 920 should not be capable of more than 2.1 channels.

If Alienware can't help, I would contact Creative/Sound Blaster and see if that software you listed is what is required to make 5.1 work! That's all assuming the card is not integrated (or software based audio).

Alienware|Porras said: You should try reinstalling the drivers from both, DELL and Creative's website and check if it works fine.

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Tried that, no good. At least from Creative. Where do I pull em from Dell's site?

Here ya go:

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19/DriverDetails/DriverFileFormats?DriverId=3KM1J&FileId=2982857979&productCode=alienware-aurora-r4&urlProductCode=False

This is for the X-Fi Titantium sound card. It is version A00-00 RC2.0. Since this is the initial release driver from 12/15/2011, i'm sure the Creative driver is much newer. May want to uninstall that before installing this driver.