Loadrelief640

After much research (or so I thought) I decided to replace my ancient Logitech X-530 5.1 analog speaker system with the above-mentioned soundbar. The hope was to both upgrade the sound quality and cut down on my mess of cables by using digital cables and wireless connections to the subwoofer and rear speakers. The system is a recently built Windows 10 Pro x64 with an EVGA X99 FTW-K motherboards (with integrated digital/analog sound) and an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0 video card.
Turns out nothing works right and many things don't work at all:
1. Ok, one expection: The soundbar paired with the subwoofer automatically and running the speaker test gave very nice and clear audio from both the front and rear speakers and good-sounding subwoofer.
2. The SB refused to pair with my iPhone 6plus using the SmartCast app over bluetooth. A dozen tries with the phone held right next to the indicated point with the lights indicating that pairing mode was active each resulted in failure to detect any devices. Curiously, the SB was easily detected over bluetooth as a sound device by both the phone (using the iOS pairing function) and my computer's bluetooth adapter. But of course that didn't make the SmartCast app work.
3. The SB refused to pair with my iPhone using the SmartCast app over Wifi. About half the time the Vizio wifi network did not appear at all. When it did, I could get a few steps further, but either switching back to my home network failed or it timed out determining the SB's IP address (which is also curious as the IP address assigned to the SB showed up readily on my router's config screen).
4. In combination this meant that I could not use the SmartCast app at all which rendered most of the instructions useless. It seems that most functions are also available using the remote which comes with the SB, but they are barely documented.
5. Hooking the SB up via coax S/PDIF resulted in no sound.
6. Hooking the SB up via optical S/PDIF somewhat worked, but it was impossible to configure the SB as anything but a stereo device in Windows. If all I wanted was stereo sound, I would not bother with a speaker system this expensive and convoluted. I realize that S/PDIF does not support uncompressed 5.1 audio, but it supposedly does support compressed 5.1 audio via Dolby Digital and DTS and I could live with that. And while sending DD and DTS signals via the 'Supported Formats' tab under 'Manage Audio Devices' does work, the result is still just stereo and nothing plays on the rear speakers or subwoofers.
7. Hooking the SB up via HDMI IN was a problem. The EVGA 1080 only has a single HDMI port, but plenty of DPs, one of which my 4k60p screen is hooked up to. So I had to sacrifice my Oculus Rift's HDMI port to connect the SB. Ah, well, I had an idea about going SLI anyway, didn't I?
8. Connected via HDMI the SB still did not work right. Now it was possible to configure the device as 5.1 surround, but all options failed. Running the test with:
(a) 5.1 Surround with rear speakers: L, C, R, and Sub play correctly. RL and RR are played on R and L instead.
(b) 5.1 Surround with sude speakers: Ditto
(c) Surround: L, C, and R play correctly. Rear plays through C. Sub, RL, and RR don't exist.
(d) Quadraphonic: L and R play correctly. RL and RR played on R and L instead. C and Sub don't exist.
(e) Stereo: L and R play correctly. RL, RR, Sub, and C don't exist.
(Turning Surround On and Off on the remote has no effect on this).
9. No documentation or idea what the Ethernet port does.
10. Connecting through the optical out of the monitor works, but forces everything down to stereo. That may be the monitor's fault.
So I am about to give up and send this thing (which apart from not working sounds quite nice and would fit in well in my office) back. Any suggestion for fixing this? Any suggested alternatives which do work?