First Post!

I need advice on how the get a pair of rear speakers working.

I recently bought a set of Logitech z-640 speakers. These are a 5.1 set (2 front, 2 rear, 1 center, and 1 sub). These replaced a standard set of left/right/sub speakers. The sub and the front speakers work fine. The rear speakers are silent.

System: Asus A7v266 mobo w/c-media onboard sound, 512mb ram, AMD XP1700. RedHat v8 is loaded, 'everything' was installed.

I tried all combinations of the 3 audio jacks into the 3 ports on the mobo. Nothing comes from the rear set. There was one combination which made the rear speakers work, but that disables the front set. The speakers are not the problem.

Any tips on what drivers, config changes, etc might work? Will a separate soundcard (ie, SB Live...) do the trick? I don't care if surround sound works, I just want all the speakers to work.

(I saw some other posts here concerning other soundcard problems. These don't apply because I do have a working sound server, I can play cd audio, and test sounds / system sounds are ok)

On board sound typically doesnt have support for rear speakers. The 3 jacks would be 1 for audio out, 1 for audio in (or line in) and one for microphone. So, with your current setup, you cannot have rear speakers, go out and buy a nice Audigy2

An (almost) immediate solution would be to buy a 3.5mm stereo splitter, which you plau both front and rear into the splitter, then plug that into audio out. Doing it that way will give you "rear sound" but you wont be able to do any funky 3d sound or positional sound; it will still make sound though

Scrapz

Actually, this board does support surround sound. Straight from the Asus website: " Experience high-quality 6-channel 3D surround audio with the optional C-Media CMI8738 audio controller." Oops, I just noticed the work 'optional'. But the CMI8738 controller is recognized by the system, so I believe it is there.

The splitter option might end up being the answer, but I still would like to find a real fix.

Well, I found (kind of) a fix.

Went to Radio Shack and bought a $6 'Headphone Cable Y-Adapter'. This allowed me to connect the front and rear audio connectors coming out of the Logitechs to the 'Line Out' port on the soundcard. The center speaker also works when the 'Matrix' button is depressed.

The front and rear speakers now work, although not true surround sound. Good enough for me...