Well.. Maybe that was a bad idea to make audio-CD's out of dts-wav's to begin with. My mistake.. I just ripped those wav's back to my hard drive storage.
However.. I played around with multichannel ac3/dts/wav and suddenly they stopped playing - static, chopper noise, slow (1/4th normal) playback. All kinds of bad things but no multichannel output.
I even bough an expensive Xonar soundcard hoping it would fix everything - no luck, same story.
It was all bad until I switched from "J River audio engine (using DirectShow filters)" to "J River video engine (using DirectShow filters)" for dts/ac3/wav - now all is fine! (using ac3filter).
I found that if J River audio engine (using DirectShow filters) is used, Filter 'JRiver Audio Renderer' steps in and hijacks the output.
Filter Graph Info (Graph for type: ac3):
Filter 'JRiver Audio Renderer'
CLSID: {EC1F74A8-7E55-4814-9F9F-D417489075CA}
Host:
Input Pin 'In'
Connected to pin 'Out' of filter 'AC3Filter'
Major type MEDIATYPE_Audio Sub type MEDIASUBTYPE_PCM, Format type FORMAT_WaveFormatEx
Filter 'AC3Filter'
CLSID: {A753A1EC-973E-4718-AF8E-A3F554D45C44}
Host: C:\Program Files\AC3Filter\ac3filter.ax
Input Pin 'In'
Connected to pin 'Output' of filter 'AC3File'
Major type MEDIATYPE_Audio Sub type MEDIASUBTYPE_DOLBY_AC3, Format type FORMAT_WaveFormatEx
Output Pin 'Out'
Connected to pin 'In' of filter 'JRiver Audio Renderer'
Major type MEDIATYPE_Audio Sub type MEDIASUBTYPE_PCM, Format type FORMAT_WaveFormatEx
Filter 'AC3File'
CLSID: {F7380D4C-DE45-4F03-9209-15EBA8552463}
Host: C:\Program Files\AC3File\ac3file.ax
Output Pin 'Output'
Connected to pin 'In' of filter 'AC3Filter'
Major type MEDIATYPE_Audio Sub type MEDIASUBTYPE_DOLBY_AC3, Format type FORMAT_WaveFormatEx
phew...
Xonar goes back to Fry's : )