No normal SPDIF output on Audigy 2 ZS

[haarp]

Greetings.

I just replaced my aging cheapo analog speaker set with a proper receiver and a set of speakers. It is connected to my Audigy 2 ZS card via optical SPDIF.
ALSA sound always worked fine, so I went on to test normal playback. Nothing works. Everything that uses the default ALSA device, like music players, sound effects and such, simply don't do anything. The receiver doesn't receive any signal, although in the software side, everything looks normal.
Then I went on and tested SPDIF passthrough in videos. To my amazement, this works just fine! So I went on to do a simple speaker-test (from alsautils). Here's the result:

Code: Select all

speaker-test -c2 -t wav -D default

-> test works as expected, except that nothing can be heard. Receiver gets no signal.

Code: Select all

speaker-test -c2 -t wav -D spdif

-> I can hear stuff!
So the connection does work flawlessly.

Then I went on to try unmuting stuff and changing levels in alsamixer. Especially interesting were the switches "IEC958 Optical Raw" and "Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack". I tried combinations of both, but none works.

Next I tried the commands as suggested here: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ALS ... DIF_output
to no avail.

As you can see, I ran outta ideas. Does anyone know how to fix this? Please don't suggest making the default device into "spdif" in .asoundrc, as I tried that with the result that only one app can play sound at a time :/