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

@Someone01 After you’ve downloaded the ZIP file and extracted it to a folder (on your Shadow VM), you need to right-click on the .INF file and click Install. There are two subfolders...one with the streaming speakers, and one with the microphone. I don’t think the microphone is needed, but both are what Steam is supposed to install when using its streaming.

Thank you so much for this! I’m going to validate it later today.

Good find! I can confirm this works on my 7.1 system. I verified with the Tomb Raider benchmark I mentioned in https://forum.shadow.tech/compatibility-44/dolby-surround-dts-through-shadow-523?postid=3310#post3310 and it was great to have that be correct. Additionally, the Windows “test tones” can be verified to be coming out of the correct channels.

I have more information to contribute on this, but I don’t have the time to do that right now. I at least wanted to confirm that I got it working.

Thanks again for this discovery!

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.

ok so i figured out how to install the files and it work! i just did sound test and can hear from all the speakers now!!!! im pumped! its my son first time playing a scary game and now he will have the FULL surround sound experience to go along with it! yay! thanks a million!

@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:

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

1. Download files from your dropbox in the Shadow, right click on the INF files, click install
2. Switch over to the Steam Speakers.  Initially sound quality was poor and coming out of the wrong speakers / all speakers simultaneously
3. Reboot Shadow PC (not a restart of Shadow itself, but within that Shadow PC, go to start, then restart)
4. 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…

There was an AMA today and I asked about HDR and 5.1 sound and the response was that it is on their roadmap for 2021. Woot!

Please be advised that the Android 3.3.0-BETA client appears to break surround-sound on Shield TV when using this Steam Streaming Speakers method...I commented on the update thread:

I can confirm this works on the 2017 Shield TV. Thanks for the drivers. :-) Where did you find these drivers by the way? I ask in case they need to be updated periodically.

There was another way I mentioned on a different thread. In my sound devices panel (Shadow VM), sometimes another sound option becomes available. Blade_Monitor. It’s always there in the control pannel, but not always “pluged in”. That has 5.1 and 7.1 options out of the box. Don’t know why it doesn’t always show up. Perhaps somthing they are working on.

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)

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

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