Those are good possibilities. I had the impression that C-Media wasn't an overall crappy sound chip, and that's why I went without a new soundcard. My old Soundblaster's rear outputs did exactly that (ie: got blasted. it seemingly blew out).

I'm going to fiddle around with the settings some more and see what I find. I like having them play through all the speakers because I have them in this sort of setup:

   O    O

O    me    O

This gives a really nice sound field. I don't need surround sound, so going with the y-splitter would be okay for me (that's how I had it set up before). I liked having good control over each speaker though. Oh well.