Hello, I'm new and wondering if i can be helped on this.

I have an audigy sound card with altec lansing 4.1 speakers. I want to listen to music, watch dvds, and all i ever seem to get is sound from the front 2 speakers. I have looked at the creative speaker diagnostic and set it up for 4.1 use and have run a sound test and all speakers work properly! i've then made sure this is synchronised with control panel (quadspeakers). However when playing audio -cd's,other audio..it only plays from 2 speakers.

any reasons why? solutions?

thanks

Stereo encoded audio is intended to only play out of the front channels, no problem there. For multichannel playback you need a multichannel source, e.g. 3D Audio supporting game, multi-channel audio (Certain music formats, not CD) & in the case of DVD your DVD player needs to support 4.1 output.
Beyond that, if sound test works fine there's nothing wrong.

Sorry to seem ignorant but then why bother having 4.1 or even 5.1 speakers when audio like cds,mp3's and mpegs can only play via the front 2 channels? this would mean they are limited. In my car, I have front and rear speakers and with the cd head unit it plays sound thru all 4 channels..and i can get it to work from front and rear seperately also. My point is, how come i can utilise all speakers in a car and not on my pc.i thought it would be the same...as in esscence its 2 front and 2 rear.

I'm sure before when I had a 5.1 card and the same speakers, I got sound from all channels.

Actually, you have a Creative Soundcard (Don't know how I missed that first time round). If you open the EAX Console & enable CMSS you'll get multi-channel output for stereo sources. Depending on your media player (foobar2000, probably winamp too) there are plugins that you can use to enable a Stereo X2 effect (This tends to sound better than CMSS does). This is how most Soundcards used to output audio in 4/5.1 modes (The rear channels replicated the front).