I'm using Creative 5.1 speakers and my motherboard's sound card.

I noticed that some sounds only play through my center speaker.

_When I test them all work fine.
_When I play a game or watch a movie all work fine.
But...

_Windows sounds (logon sounds, notification sounds, empty recycle bin... etc) only play through my center speaker.
_Some older games sounds (e.g. footsteps in MM7) only play through center speaker. The other sounds in MM7 and music play through all front speakers.

What's more, when I play a mono wav file using VLC media player or Windows media player, it plays through all front speakers.
But when I assign that file to e.g. Logon sound, then it plays only through my center speaker on logon.

Magic Carpet 2 (Dosbox) plays through all speakers.

Is there any way of fixing this? To force mono sounds to play through all front speakers? The Windows 7 sounds are not that much of a bother (though I suppose it'll become an annoyance now that I notice it), but I'm afraid it will affect the sound of some older games.

Thanks.

Found this:


https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/925901

Mono content in multichannel hardware is provided through center speaker only
The new Audio Engine in Windows Vista provides single-channel, or mono, content through the center channel. At the same time, the Audio Engine provides audio on a multichannel speaker configuration such as the 5.1 audio system or the 7.1 audio system. This behavior differs from Windows XP where mono audio is equally split between the left and right channels. Therefore, if a user plugs headphones into the left or right output of a 5.1 audio system, mono content is inaudible. Additionally, some in-speaker headphone outputs that are on multichannel systems may not mix all the channels to stereo. In this case, all audio is inaudible through the systems.
If this default behavior presents hardware difficulties, use the Speaker Setup dialog box that is available in Control Panel to change the number of audio channels that run to the stereo. This causes the Audio Engine to send mono audio to the left and right channels.

Except that in Speaker configuration in Windows 7, there is no option to change it to "cause the Audio Engine to send mono audio to the left and right channels." Speaker Fill doesn't work.

At least in Realtek card I see the option called "speaker fill" which adjust any source and plays it though all the speaker.

It's shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmRbsOM0hU0

Check the software for your card, it should have that option.

See last sentence above. Speaker Fill doesn't work.

It causes stereo sound to play through front and rear speakers. But mono sounds still play through center speaker only.