I have an Onkyo TX-NR5100 home theater connected to my PC.
I’d like to use the home theater’s upmixing for non-surround content, such as listening to music on YouTube or any streaming app.
The problem is that if I set the AV Receiver’s output (Nvidia High Definition Audio) to Surround 5.1, Windows sends a fake audio signal to the channels that don’t have audio.
This causes the Receiver to receive all the full channels, but some are silent. This means that the sound only comes out of the side speakers, since the upmixing isn’t applied because all the channels are full.
If I set Windows to stereo, the upmixing will work, but in this case, I believe I’ll lose the true surround sound of games and movies that send this signal.
What do you recommend?
What’s the best alternative in this case?
EDIT
As Voicemeter Banana was suggested, here’s the explanation for why it doesn’t work in this case either:
The green circles are the audio inputs, and red circles are the audio outputs. Note that the virtual cable “Cable Output” is set to A2, and “Voicemeter’s default audio input” is set to A1.
The problem is that it’s not possible to set the same audio output for A1 and A2; this causes either A1 or A2 to be muted.
It’s also not possible to set the audio output in Windows to be the Voicemeter and another to the AV Receiver. This is because Voicemeter takes control of the audio devices defined in its outputs. Therefore, audio sent directly to the AV Receiver is not played while VB is open.
