AD 1980 Audio Soundmax or Vinyl

[akenis]

Had a lot of problems getting SPDIF to pass AC3 to my amp. Tried multiple settings and different software and players: Nvidia, AC3 Filter, MPC. Never got the "DolbyDigital" light on the amp. Read in different forum about others with the problem with similiar hardware, and was convinced it wouldn't work with the Soundmax driver. Asus hasn't updated the driver since 2003. Others say they got it to work by downloading different brand driver and modifying the .inf file.

Don't know what happened, my mine started working???? Fixed the problem, but I don't know how? Hate that. But then it stopped working. I think after using a different player ...wmp. Lots of tinkering and I couldn't make it work again. Reboot and it worked. Confused.

While at the via chipset site, I saw a vinyl driver (recent updates) for the AC97 coded on my board and chipset. Thought I'd try that. It works, and has the same configuration type settings as the soundmax software. Gonna dump the SoundMax stuff for now. Am I missing something here?