Did Dell rip me off?

Anyone know a newsgroup for sound related issues. There is something wrong
with my newsgroups server and I can't search for any.

I might just as well tell you guys my problem now, you never know. I have a
Altec Lansing ADA-880 speaker set and a SoundBlaster 512. I got them them
with my Dell system and I have become suspecious on the regards of their
true surround sound capibilities. I normally have the two smaller rear
speakers plugged in the two bigger front ones which should give me a virtual
surround sound effect. There is a dobly surround button on my speakers and
remote control that should turn dobly surround on, but when I turn it on I
just get a distorted sound. When I go to Liveware 3 and test the speakers I
only hear "front left and front right" but never left rear or right rear no
matter how I play with them, even if I put the two smaller speakers on their
two little stands. I can get the rear channel by plugging my speaker set in
another output plug but when i do i only the rear right and rear left when
i test the speakers. In my sound card there are two outputs for the
speakers, one of the holes for it is green and the other i can't remember.
Does this mean that to have surround sound the front and rear speakers need
to be plugged into two different channels? If this is so can I just buy a
another set of stereo speakers and plug them in the rear channel and keep
this essiting set in plugged in the front channel to get surround sound?

A friend of mine told me that the surround sound only works when using the
digital output which is used for DVDs which I don't have, so did i get
ripped off from Dell when they said that I the ADA-880 was a true surround
sound speaker system? That's makes me feel pretty bad when in the past 3
years we have spent about 13,000 dollars in all on dell desktops and
laptops.

Here's the deal - to get 4-speaker surround sound, you need four inputs. It sounds like you are currently splitting 2 inputs into 4 speakers, hence you only hear the "Front" tests.

However, you can plug your "Rear" speakers directly into the second output of your SB card. This plug outputs a different signal than the Green plug, and you will then hear the "Rear" tests.

The odd things, which you've noticed, but I guess Dell didn't tell you are: Your 2 big speakers are still only taking a single, dual-channel input (not 2 dual-channels), so you're physically splitting a copy of the Front signal to the little speakers. And, the "Dolby" switch on the speakers is really just a trick to make it sound like 4 different channels. What these normally do is to "spatially expand" the signal by delaying the output to your "rear" speakers - but, as you've found, this isn't close to real 4-speaker surround sound.

The digital output question is a separate issue, that's not really related to your 4-channel vs. split 2-channel setup.

actually the way the ADA880 are made, they don't have to stereo inputs, only one. and one spdif, so you only get "True Surround Sound" when the spdif jack is being used, and the only way for this is to have a spdif jack on the card (i'm not sure if the 512 has this), and for the software to utilize this, which typically only dvd software does, no games I know use spdif.