X-Fi Titanium's decoder-embargoed digital input

This is very odd and very frustrating. In the last 12 years since I have owned windows based computer, I have always selected the Creative Sound Blaster because I wanted to stay compatible, and I've always chosen their top-end products since I have wanted the best from my PC. It's been a long time since I've upgraded. But now for the first time, I feel like I have helplessly downgraded. I thought I'd go and invest some money for the new Sound Blaster that would be more Vista / Win 7 friendly, as the old card was starting to show its age. With Creative's newest, state-of-the-art flagship Sound Blaster I not get DTS through the spdif in. I get nothing - no Dolby Digital 5.1 EITHER. All I get is useless two-channel PCM. Please help me. This is very frustrating.

I need to tell you something that I can enable dts and all the linear pcm without any problems whatsoever but when selecting dolby digital I get static when loud ambient type sounds are happening there is a fix for this sort of but it's not fixing the problem just duct taping it. Some games allow you to go into the sound options and turn ambient volume down lower if you can put it down to say 50 to 40% it will stop the cracking and popping but still this is a retarded fix

For your "Creative Audio Service is not started" problem, you can just go to start, and run and after that type services.msc. While the listing of services to comes up. At that time you will have to make sure to look for "Creative Audio Service" and after that put its properties to automatic. Whilst you are at it, be certain to go ahead and manually start the service. Then try the control panel again. Good luck!!!

I just wished to react to this post saying I essentially have the similar problem. I searched for the same on internet but was not able to find any successive fix for this from last three days. By the way I have a sound blaste x-fi elite pro. I am really hoping something can be done about this. I mean this is one of the biggest reasons you would even want an i/o drive is so you could hook things up to it and make it work properly. The ps3 should work through s/pdif in and get dolby digital and dts. I am just telling you I am one with the same problem and letting you know it seems as if they don't care.

Going to Group will require continuing to spend in product development, mainly for Zii Platform. The Group will too deepen its focus on marketing Zii Platform. As a consequence, operating expenses might enlarge in the coming quarters. The general market intended for the Group’s existing products remains hard and random and the Group expects to detail an operating loss during the existing quarter." I think the best answer is making products that is not what their consumers expect from the company that was synonym of soundboards. I was another one that trusts in Creative and I believe that I was fooled, because I bought the most advanced sound card from the “BEST” sound card maker and I don't have a DD/DTS decoder.

I am sorry to post in such an old thread, but I believe I may have found a solution to the problem here. This has been frustrating me for a long time, and having to reinstall my drivers again (due to a NVIDIA driver update causing conflict), I decided to try and find a more permanent solution than previously. Up until now I have been installing the drivers off the disk (I use Win7), and then updating various components manually. This sometimes works, but is rather fiddly. Today I did not have access to the drivers disk so had to try and install purely from the newest drivers on Creative's website. Everything goes well, (the -a -deleter switches are required to install the driver, and the other files need to be extracted with 7zip and run manually) except that, and I believe is what causes everyone else's problems too, the driver silently fails to register the creative audio service in windows. This causes the error "the creative audio service is not started" when trying to enable DDL or DTS. Therefore, the fix to the issue is to register the service using the below command (drop it into a prompt) supplied by creative in their driver package.

For Windows Vista/7 x64:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Creative\Shared Files\CTAudSvc.exe" -install

For Windows Vista/7 x32:
"C:\Program Files\Creative\Shared Files\CTAudSvc.exe" -install

Turns out to be that simple! Please let me know if this works/doesn't work for you.