How to make the digital audio output (S/PDIF port) work on Dell XPS one 2710 desktop

@Lovecd  What you're doing should work.  Are you sure the Toslink cable is actually good?  They're fiber optic cables, so they're more fragile than most.  But if I were you, I'd focus on just getting your HDMI audio path working properly.  You should be able to configure your media playback application to send audio in bitstream format rather than PCM to get native DD/DTS to your receiver.  If it will do that over Toslink/SPDIF, it should also support doing that over HDMI.  That's just a setting within the application.  And HDMI has a lot more bandwidth available for audio than Toslink/SPDIF anyway and therefore it can support more audio formats.  Toslink/SPDIF can only send 2-channel PCM or 5.1 channel DD/DTS bitstream.  HDMI can send multi-channel PCM and the advanced audio codecs in bitstream, like DD TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, Dolby Atmos, and DTS:X -- none of which are supported by Toslink/SPDIF.  Although on a side note, with the exception of Dolby Atmos and DTS:X that have to be sent in bitstream to be decoded by the receiver in order to achieve proper spatial audio effects, there is no quality difference whatsoever between sending audio as bitstream to your receiver vs. decoding it on your system and sending it as multi-channel PCM.  PCM is just uncompressed audio, so getting from a Dolby or DTS format to PCM is just a matter of decompressing the audio, rather like decompressing a zip file, so it doesn't matter at all whether that's done by the source device or the receiver.  In fact, handling it on the source device can sometimes be better, because if you're working with an older receiver that doesn't support DD TrueHD or DTS-HD MA but does support multi-channel PCM, then if you have a source device that supports those codecs, you can use it to perform the decompression and send multi-channel PCM to your receiver to enjoy the full quality of those higher-end codecs.  By comparison, if you insisted on bitstream with an older receiver, you'd only be able to send legacy DD/DTS to the receiver, which wouldn't sound as good.  But if both your source device and receiver support the codec in question, then it doesn't matter which one you use, unless you just really want to see that Dolby/DTS logo light up on your receiver.  But again, Toslink/SPDIF is an older and more limited audio interface than HDMI, so if you have a source that supports HDMI audio output, it makes no sense at all to avoid that and try to use Toslink/SPDIF instead.

So go into the Windows Sound settings, select your HDMI output, then choose to Configure it to make sure you've specified that you have a 5.1 setup (or whatever you have) in order to make sure your device will send multi-channel PCM over HDMI.  And then if you really want to, look through your application settings to see how to tell it to send bitstream output, or just leave it as-is.

Thanks so much, will try that shortly.

Shaun