Help with 7.1 Surround Sound on iMac (2011)

The music itself has to be encoded into a surround sound format.

5.1 is 6 channel, 7.1 is eight channels, 2.0 stereo is two channel, left and right speaker.

So if your playing a DVD movie and it had Dolby 7.1, then you select that to play back in the DVD preferences and then set your reciever to play back 7.1 Dolby Digital, and then you get your 7.1.

Mac's only pass the surround sound through, it doesn't process it.

cd music and iTMS music is created in stereo, 2.0.

Now some surround sound receivers have the ability to take the 2.0 and turn it into 4 channel, send the lower frequencies to the sub woofer etc.

That's not "true" surround sound of course, but it sounds a heck of a lot better than stereo as it fills the room.

If you play a 3D game on your Mac that has surround sound, and you sit in teh middle of the speakers, you get the effect of things walking up behind you, flying around your head etc.

You'll get better effect with BlueRay movies that have fancy 5.1 and 7.1 for theater like effects watching movies.

Mac's don't play BlueRay. 😟 You will need a PS3 or BlueRay DVD player.

dyountmusic wrote:

Is there any way to just push the sound through all the speakers (regardless of whether it's true surround sound or not)?

That's a capability if your receiver has it to branch electronically.

You can opt to manually "branch" the outputs of the LF to match the LR and the RF to match the RR, the lower frequencies should be going to the sub-woofer anyway and it doesn't matter where that's placed.

All depend if you have bare wires or connectors, then use a y-branch like so to match your cables, RCA etc. stereo outputs of LF and RF

How do I know if the reciever is set to play back 7.1 Dolby Digital?

Check the receiver manual for it's decoding options and selection, but like I said before, you need sound encoded in Dobly 7.1 playing back on something (blueRay DVD most likely) and then monkey with the reciever setting to play it.

You'll know when you got it. 🙂