I have FINALLY discovered how to get correct, non buggy 5.1/7.1 Surround Sound!! :)

Userlevel 5

+4

@Rich5741 Okay, I have some more information.

I have three Windows PCs in the house running Steam. On the two that I use the most, both already had the “Steam Streaming Speakers” playback device.

However, the third one did not...which makes sense because I’ve only used it for downloading games with Xfinity WiFi to get around Comcast’s data caps. I can then backup the game to central storage, and restore on a different computer. Anyhoo, I installed a small game on this computer, and then used another one to Remote Play from it. After that, the host computer still did not have the “Steam Streaming Speakers” playback device installed.

Then, I started sniffing around in Device Manager on my main PC...and looked at the properties of the device to see when it was installed, which driver files it was using, etc. As it turns out, those driver files can be copied to another PC, and then used to install the device. With this method, I was able to install the Steam Streaming Speakers/Microphone on that third PC that didn’t have them before.

So, the question becomes...do you want to try installing these devices on your Shadow VM? I have no idea if that will make the surround audio streaming start working, but maybe?

For reference, the driver files are in a Windows “DriverStore” path, and all I had to do was copy them (four files for each device) to a folder on the target PC, right-click the INF file, and then Install. After the UAC prompt, the device was successfully installed.

Here’s a screenshot from my Shadow VM, of the devices/files I’m talking about:

R

@Rich5741Okay, I have some more information.

I have three Windows PCs in the house running Steam. On the two that I use the most, both already had the “Steam Streaming Speakers” playback device.

However, the third one did not...which makes sense because I’ve only used it for downloading games with Xfinity WiFi to get around Comcast’s data caps. I can then backup the game to central storage, and restore on a different computer. Anyhoo, I installed a small game on this computer, and then used another one to Remote Play from it. After that, the host computer still did not have the “Steam Streaming Speakers” playback device installed.

Then, I started sniffing around in Device Manager on my main PC...and looked at the properties of the device to see when it was installed, which driver files it was using, etc. As it turns out, those driver files can be copied to another PC, and then used to install the device. With this method, I was able to install the Steam Streaming Speakers/Microphone on that third PC that didn’t have them before.

So, the question becomes...do you want to try installing these devices on your Shadow VM? I have no idea if that will make the surround audio streaming start working, but maybe?

For reference, the driver files are in a Windows “DriverStore” path, and all I had to do was copy them (four files for each device) to a folder on the target PC, right-click the INF file, and then Install. After the UAC prompt, the device was successfully installed.

Here’s a screenshot from my Shadow VM, of the devices/files I’m talking about:

Awesome work - very comprehensive. Yes, I’ll give it a shot - I only have two windows PCs however, so I’ll need to see if I can get the Steam speakers to install on one of them in order to grab the drivers

Userlevel 5

+4

Awesome work - very comprehensive. Yes, I’ll give it a shot - I only have two windows PCs however, so I’ll need to see if I can get the Steam speakers to install on one of them in order to grab the drivers

I can ZIP them up and make them available for download as well; just lemme know if you need that.

Edit/update: Here are the drivers if you can’t find them elsewhere: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w1x1cel34ltw8bf/SteamStreamingDevices.zip?dl=0

Userlevel 5

+4

@Rich5741 just curious...have you made any headway on this?

R

@Rich5741just curious...have you made any headway on this?

I finally got a chance to do it, and I did get it to work:

Download files from your dropbox in the Shadow, right click on the INF files, click install
Switch over to the Steam Speakers. Initially sound quality was poor and coming out of the wrong speakers / all speakers simultaneously
Reboot Shadow PC (not a restart of Shadow itself, but within that Shadow PC, go to start, then restart)
Upon reboot and re-selecting Shadow PC it now works very well.

Note that I go a lot of audio stuttering if I had high quality sound enabled. It worked much better without; I don’t think its a network issue (I have gigabit fiber, my Shadow ping is usually 6-8ms), may be a computer issue (running on an ancient PC I built in 2012 and upgraded GPU several years later - i7-3770S and GTX970).

Maybe this could help the Shadow guys get 5.1 enabled in the default drivers?

Now if only Shadow would enable Ultra and Infinite in the US…

Userlevel 5

+4

Yes, I too have significant audio stutter with the “high quality audio” selected, unless I use TCP for streaming (which has other downsides). I’m leaving the “high quality audio” off for now, as my ears can’t detect any difference when it’s on, and because of that I’d rather the bandwidth go towards the video stream.

There’s a different thread about the audio problems here:

Userlevel 4

+4

Thortok2000
Former Moderator
138 replies
2 years ago
19 September 2020

I have just bought a sound bar, with the rear speakers arriving on Monday, and was looking to do this exact thing. I had the same issue as Rich, where the ‘Steam Streaming Speakers’ didn’t show up, so thanks for those dropbox files.

I don’t have the rear speakers yet to test, but the LFE sound doesn’t come through, everything else seems to be working as normal. I also had to set it to 7.1 in order to get ‘rear’ speakers but then turned off the side ones (the 5.1 only had side ones, not rear ones).

I’m also using a ghost, UDP, high quality audio, and the alpha client. I haven’t done much testing yet (will do more when the rear speakers are hooked up) but so far no audio stuttering. Works great!

Userlevel 5

+4

I’m also using a ghost, UDP, high quality audio, and the alpha client. I haven’t done much testing yet (will do more when the rear speakers are hooked up) but so far no audio stuttering. Works great!

If true surround-sound worked with the Ghost, that would be the cat’s meow! And also mean there is still hope for it to come to Android TV (Nvidia Shield TV).

Userlevel 5

+4

Jim29er
Guide
530 replies
2 years ago
2 October 2020

Hello people, I wanted to report that while testing to see if the AI upscaling (a feature of the Nvidia Shield TV 2019 Pro) worked with Shadow (it does), I observed that my AVR was reporting LPCM 7.1 input. I then went and did my “usual tests” with the Steam streaming speakers, and the channels were indeed accurate!

I don’t know when the Android [TV] Shadow app started supporting this, but it is literally a “game changer” (pun intended) for me, and I’m planning on more Shield testing this weekend.

A

Hello people, I wanted to report that while testing to see if the AI upscaling (a feature of the Nvidia Shield TV 2019 Pro) worked with Shadow (it does), I observed that my AVR was reporting LPCM 7.1 input. I then went and did my “usual tests” with the Steam streaming speakers, and the channels were indeed accurate!

I don’t know when the Android [TV] Shadow app started supporting this, but it is literally a “game changer” (pun intended) for me, and I’m planning on more Shield testing this weekend.

While this works like magic on my 2014 laptop with a USB soundblaster DAC, my 2019 Shield did not play the speakers accurately, it played as if all of them (except subwoofer) were in the soundbar and side speakers didn’t exist. I wonder if that has to do with the speaker setup being shield to TV to arc soundbar surround system. But at least having 5.1 from my PC is great! (though i think my hdmi cable isnt that good because everything lags just a tad on the big tv screen through the pc)

Userlevel 5

+4

<snip> I wonder if that has to do with the speaker setup being shield to TV to arc soundbar surround system.<snip>

That’s correct...ARC doesn’t generally support multichannel PCM.

A

That’s correct...ARC doesn’t support multichannel PCM.

So I guess optical wouldn’t either, to get it working from Shield I’d need a proper receiver, huh?

Userlevel 5

+4

So I guess optical wouldn’t either, to get it working from Shield I’d need a proper receiver, huh?

Yes, one where you can connect the Shield to it via HDMI, and then connect the AVR to the TV via the ARC port (so that the TV ARC still works).

A

Wait… what about connecting the Shield through HDMI to the Soundbar and then having HDMI ARC from soundbar to TV?

Userlevel 5

+4

Wait… what about connecting the Shield through HDMI to the Soundbar and then having HDMI ARC from soundbar to TV?

Yes indeed, that’s what I mean. That is the “best practice” method - connecting Shield to the sound system via HDMI, and then connecting the sound system to the TV via HDMI ARC. If the sound system supports all of the codecs/formats you need, that’s the way to go.

Userlevel 4

+4

Thortok2000
Former Moderator
138 replies
2 years ago
17 October 2020

So after a lot of testing and trying different things I finally came across a method to get 5.1 on my ghost.

It’s basically as simple as using this: https://us.creative.com/p/sound-blaster/sound-blaster-omni-surround-5-1

Plug that into a blue port, use optical to connect to the soundbar, and then set the ‘audio format’ to Dolby Digital Live.

Windows will report 2 channels, that’s for PCM. As long as anything is actually encoded for 5.1 speakers it will play like 5.1 speakers. All the 5.1 test sounds work and I played Horizon Zero Dawn and it was true 5.1.

(You know you’re only getting 2.0 when only left/right channels work, all sounds that come from the back also come from the front, and you don't get the LFE channel.)

My next issue is my ping is JUST high enough that audio stutter was a pretty big issue, so I found a kind of workaround for that, too, at least until I can figure out how to get my ping lower. If your ping is low enough, then you’re done and don’t need this next part:

Instead of plugging the usb sound card in to the ghost, I plugged it into a laptop, and set up the speakers on the laptop. Then I connected to the shadow client and used the ‘steam streaming speakers’ mentioned earlier in the thread. This allowed 5.1 sound coming from shadow without a lot of audio stutter since it wasn’t using USB over IP.

Then, I set the ghost as the second screen device, and loaded up the game on that screen. It took a bit of fooling around to get the second screen working. If I loaded up the game first and then tried to switch monitors, shadow crashed. If I was on desktop and tried to make the second screen the ‘main display’, shadow crashed. (Since this is an alpha feature it’s only to be expected that it doesn’t work perfectly, yet).

But somewhere in my trial and error I got the TV’s screen to be monitor ‘1’ and the laptop to be monitor ‘2’ (even though the laptop was still the ‘main display’). I made sure all the resolution and hz was correct, then loaded up the game, which defaulted to monitor 1.

And bam, I was playing 4k, 60hz, 5.1 sound.

Why not use the laptop and connect it to the TV instead of the ghost? Cause my laptop can only do 30hz at 4k, and the ghost can do 60. =P

I bet 7.1 sound would work if you found a device similar to the above that had 7.1 support. Optical cables aren’t capable of 7.1 though I don’t think, so you’d either need something with hdmi out, or a 7.1 system that could take analog/rca jacks. But I didn’t do too much digging into 7.1 since my soundbar’s only 5.1.

There’s a lot of cheap devices out there that pretend to do the same thing as this but they all say they don’t do 5.1 out the SPDIF port, this was the cheapest one I found that said it did. If your 5.1 setup can take analog input (RCA jacks), then those cheaper devices (some as cheap as like $13 or $15) would probably work for you instead. My soundbar doesn’t have those jacks unfortunately. x.x

But either way, I’m happy, and now all I need is a lower ping, lol.

A

I bet 7.1 sound would work if you found a device similar to the above that had 7.1 support.

So for that I’d recommend the Sound Blaster X3, it does allow for 7.1! I don’t have a shadow, so I don’t know how well it works but I can confirm it works with a 2019 Nvidia Shield (not the earlier models sadly) and with a PC of course.

A

Hi, So i tried this solution, I have Steam Streaming Speaker but when I use the test, there is no sound comming out. I’ve disabled bladeshadow output and all but still nothing … Is there a fix to this ?

Thank you

Userlevel 5

+4

Hi, So i tried this solution, I have Steam Streaming Speaker but when I use the test, there is no sound comming out. I’ve disabled bladeshadow output and all but still nothing … Is there a fix to this ?

Thank you

There are times when the sound stops working entirely, and a reboot of the Shadow VM will fix it. If you’ve already done that, please let us know!

A

I've restarted my shadow vm and still nothing :/

Userlevel 5

+4

I've restarted my shadow vm and still nothing :/

Can you describe your local surround-sound setup?

A

Just my computer speaker

Userlevel 5

+4

Just my computer speaker

You need to have a legit surround-sound (5.1/7.1) setup locally for this to work. You should still get sounds through the “Steam streaming speakers” regardless of setup, but this thread is narrowly-focused on surround-sound.

A

I have a 7.1 headset but it doesn't work either unfortunately

zombie
Traveler
24 replies
2 years ago
22 October 2020

I managed to get it to work I think. Using the 2017 Shield, plugged into a Onkyo receiver which is plugged to a Philips TV using ARC. Take notice of my final remarks.

Steam was not installed, no idea if that matters.

I installed the Steam driver posted by Jim29er and restarted Windows.
After reboot I selected the steam speakers, rebooted, and I still had stereo sound when testing it in ‘sound control panel’ → select (steam) speakers → select configure → select ‘test’.

This is also the place where I changed the config to 5.1 and restarted Windows.

After a reboot I still got notification sound when changing the volume slider and checking the ‘configure’ test option it confirmed 5.0 sound (I disabled subwoofer but at the test it still provided a sound for the subwoofer).

I did not disable the BladeShadow and it is still used as the default communication device.

Now I am unsure of some factors;

I selected the Shield audio setting to upscale stereo to 5.1 (pcm).

My receiver is set to ‘direct’, meaning to bypass stuff. When I changed the setting to the next configuration it said ‘multichannel’ but no more sound when clicking test. No errors, test seemed to function, just no sound. Maybe after a reboot on that setting..?

I set the quality to 16 bit 48000 dvd quality (when I first selected the steam speaker in stereo mode), as this was the best supported mode by default.

Some testing to be done but I was surprised that I did indeed managed to get surround.
Maybe quality can be improved also and maybe the shield setting for upscaling doesn't matter and maybe it can work when not using a direct mode on the receiver when you reboot or tweak.

Give it a go :)

I have FINALLY discovered how to get correct, non buggy 5.1/7.1 Surround Sound!! :)

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