Creative sound blaster Z windows 10 5.1 volume control

1

So I just bought this sound card Creative Sound Blaster Z.

Connected it via optical cable to Logitech Z906. Installed latest drivers from their web page, enabled encoding to dts and it works, my receiver shows up dts signal and it is all great, but the problem is, that volume control is not working. When I open my sound settings under "mixer" and change the volume of "Speakers" or "SPDIF-Out" nothing happens, changes only occur if I change the recorder "What U Hear" volume(works as changing output sound volume). This wouldn't be a big issue if I could just make windows default volume control to change this volume, but I can't because it is an input device, not output device.

So as I understand the situation:

  1. Creative drivers make "Speakers" available to system and it thinks that I have generic 5.1 with analog connection, but in reality it is virtual.

  2. Creative driver listens to all what system outputs to that "virtual" output using "What U Hear", encodes it to dts and then sends it via optical cable to receiver.

And thus the problem occurs because driver does not respect the system set output volume to "SPIDF-Out". I believe that this is a driver issue and it can be easily fixed.

Some side notes:

  • When I mute "SPIDF-Out" the sound get muted, but when it's set to 1% or 100% there is no difference.

  • This could be fixed by making all three components - "Speakers", "SPDIF-Out" and "What U Hear" share the same volume value, then it would guarantee that volume is set correctly.

Up until now you have read what I sent to Creative support, but meanwhile:

Am I the only one who have such a problem? I can not find anything on this anywhere, is there any solution I can achieve without coding an application which mirrors the volume values for all three involved sound interfaces? ( I am a bit lazy :D)

Maybe its just my both left hands and I am doing something wrong?

user593332

Posted 2016-05-12T17:14:09.250

Reputation: 11

I have the same exact problem. It's extremely frustrating. – atwixtor – 2016-09-26T06:07:02.043

Answers

0

Found the solution, there is a simple program called Volume2, allows to set "What U Hear" as main audio device, thus sound level adjustment now work as intended.

user593692

Posted 2016-05-12T17:14:09.250

Reputation: 1

Could you explain how you used Volume2 to fix this, and confirm the link to that program's download page? All it seems to provide me is a redundant selection of output and input devices - What U Hear is not appearing as a playback device. – atwixtor – 2016-09-26T06:05:10.183

Same, I've tried the app as well, including a LOT of differing permutations of the settings, to no avail. I never saw any change, in terms of controlling the "virtualized speakers output", it just plays at 100%, always. Individual-app-control, such as YouTube, works okay, you can mostly control these with in-app volume settings, which sometimes stick (not sure why this is, yet). – PeteG – 2018-10-24T01:23:45.863

Asked: 2016-05-12T17:14:09.250

Viewed: 1 859 times

Active: 2016-05-17T12:45:44.983