[jitaroo]

I've got a surround sound system hooked up to my pc through HDMI and i've got it working fine in surround sound 5.1 (DTS and Dolby all working great). I was wondering if there was a way to get music thats only 2 channels to be reproduced on the surround speakers. I've got a denon avr3311 and when I play music through airplay or it's own interface it plays back the music on all speakers. In xbmc it only plays the music through the front two. Is there a way to get it to play music on all speakers while not compromising on movies?

[alexrose1uk]

Not natively inside XBMC IIRC. Most amps will have surround modes for this sort of situation though that you can toggle on and off easily from the remote.

[wes paich]

(nitpick) 5.1 messes up your stereo image unless specifically mastered for it. i use stereo w/ sub.

[jitaroo]

Yeah the amp has a setting but I was wondering if windows or xbmc could do it. I'd feel better doing it through the computer.

[alexrose1uk]

With a decent amp, it should be fine, as the DSPs they come with these days are fairly good, and tbh, its a device designed solely for stuff like this. I'm not saying doing it in software is bad, but if your amp will do it easily, you're not likely to lose anything except time fiddling with software

I know the '7 channel stereo' mode on my amp is at least as good as a lot of stereo fill attempts I've heard if I want to use it.