No sound in rear speakers

I have an nvidia nForce2 motherboard with onboard sound. I am using creative inspire 5.1 speakers (5 satelites and a sub).

my problem is that i am not getting any sound out of the rear speakers and i'm sure i used to. Using the nForce control panel i have tried playing around with most of the settings with no luck. The thing that confuses me is that when i hit the "test tone" button the voice comes out of each of the speakers correctly, even the rear ones. When i listen to music i get no sound out of the rear speakers just a slight hissing. And when i watch a film i get no sound out of the rear speakers, even if the film supports 5.1 surround sound.

the only speakers i can get to work are the left the right and the sub, and the center if i choose the create center channel option in the control panel. I have tried various media players so i dont think it would be that, im sure there must be a setting i'm missing somewhere.

I recently formatted and reinstalled, and i think (infact im pretty sure) it all worked before. There is an update for the nforce audio but it causes the nForce control panel to crash, and looking at nvidias website it seems this is quite a common problem (the crashing on update, not the no sound in rear speakers)

any suggestions greatly aprechiated, cheers.

Sounds like you need a driver reinstalled after you reformatted. Can you get/use the previous version of the nforce audio, which didn't cause crashes?

problem has been fixed, but for reference...

It may have been the driver, but i dont think it was, i downloaded the latest drivers and system utility from nVidias website installed everything but still had the same problem - this is why i dont think it was the driver.

I think it was more a case of having to set each media player up to work with my speaker set up. Windows media player worked, which is what led me onto this theory. My version of WinDVD doesnt allow for surround sound , and in Winamp i needed to go to preferences and under output in the plug-ins section choose the DirectSound output and hit configure. Then in the drop down change from primary sound driver to my Nvidia audio device. i also checked the allow hardware acceleration box too.

so i think it was just a case of setting each program up to my sound setup rather than the default.

Sounds like. I didn't realize there were such settings. Glad you got it fixed.

Thanks fitzjj! I hade the same problem and did all the normal troubleshooting as well with no luck but now it works fine.
I have never needed to config winamp or other software other than the soundmixer of nvidia before this, weird, it worked for me a while ago and then all of a sudden it didn´t work.