So I went out the other night and bought a little home theater kit. Five speakers and a subwoofer. I have it all hooked up like I'm supposed to (hooking up speakers is more or less a no brainer), but something isn't right. I plugged my Wii into the receiver and got sound...but there was no sound coming from my two rear speakers. I also tried my laptop. No sound from the rear. Then I tried my 360, and all the speakers worked just fine. Once. I played my 360 again late last night and didn't get any sound from the rear speakers. I tried it again this morning, and still don't. The fuck am I doing wrong? I'm not stupid, I know how to fucking hook up speakers. Fucking technology. And I know the rear speakers aren't broken, because I tried hooking them up as front speakers. Which worked fine. If all else fails, I guess I can just switch the front with rear speakers, leave my center and subwoofer, and have some sort of...pathetic ghetto surround sound. EDIT: Turns out just my rear right speaker isn't giving me sound. I'm gonna fuck with it for a while. Advice is still welcome though. I just unplugged my rear right speaker and plugged it back in. No sound. I swear it was working fine yesterday afternoon. Would it have something to do with me running the wire under my carpet? I wouldn't think so, just because people step on wires and cords all the time, it's a day to day thing. Just trying to think of possible reasons I keep getting fucked over by this goddamn speaker.
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but have you enabled Surround sound in all the systems you checked? My setup, if set to the wrong speaker setup, doesn't give me rear sound.
Check all the wire, to make sure it's good. make sure the polarity is correct too. And make sure they're all in the correct spots. make sure the speakers aren't blown by switching them around. Make sure the surround modes are enabled. If you are using the Digital connections, (the coaxial or optical) remember that straight PCM is 2 channel only. So unless the card itself can do Dolby Digital live, you'll only hear sound from two speakers, though some machines will ecothe front to the back if you have sourround mode enabled.
I double checked all my wiring, and yeah, it's correct. And I've changed my audio settings on the Wii and Xbox. The right rear speaker is the only one I'm not getting sound out of. Apparently it was working last night when my roommate was sitting underneath it, and now it's not. I'm starting to wonder if it's because the wire is going under my carpet and my computer chair is almost on top of it.
I cannot see your system, so I can only assume things. Are the two bare speaker wires in the right parts? Maybe you have it backwards for that speaker. Or are they in right? There should be a test thing on your speaker system that makes noise come from all speakers to test it. You also need to configure the speakers a bit too, depending on how far away they are. From my experience, rear speakers do not add much, but since you just got it, this should all work. Secondly, you mention Wii... You need to do the settings like people said apparently, you may also have to do it in the game. Even 360 requires you do it in some games. For example, Ninja Gaiden 2 is defaulted to stereo sound. So always check system settings and options. And lastly, what connections are you using? I know Wii is analogue, it cannot do 'real' surround sound. It only has L/R sound. I have no idea what your laptop is using, buf if it is a mini-stereo thing, then you are only going to get that too. Again, you can 'fake' it, but it is not a big difference (you just do this in window's sound settings or whatever your OS has). As for 360, if you use L/R sound, you only get stereo. You have to use optical coslink (I think that is the name) for surround sound; or HDMI. It connects seperately to the part of the A/V wire that goes into the 360's back.
Sorry to go offtopic slightly, but when you have an xbox360 wired to a monitor, you only get a L/R audio cable. Is there anyway to get true surround even if using a monitor?
