Creative X-Fi - EAX Not Working

I've been a long time M-Audio Revolution user - but discovered recently that what I thought was surround all these years was matrixed surround (Stupid me ). Anyway, I looked at a billion sound cards (A lot anyway) and didn't find any that sounded perfect. But gaming is a priority and so is surround support via an external receiver, so I thought I'd give this Creative a shot despire the horrible rep because of it's local availability (easy return) and it does everything I need (DTS Connect and DDL encoding). People also hyped up EAX to some astronmical level, and after seeing some examples on the Creative site I thought it would be impressive. So I popped in BF2, a game that supports EAX 5.0 - set all in-game and external settings for EAX on and at normal levels...nothing. The guns sound identical if I shoot them in a small room or of I shoot them in a large open field.I tried new drivers (Was very nervous to do so, but it didn't break anything - everything works good on my Win 7 64-bit PC so far *fingers crossed*) and that didn't do it, adjusted settings (It was on the Game mode already), I tried turning it on and off and comparing - I can't hear anything! I am using the encoder to get DTS Digital out of my Logitech Z-5500 speakers - but does this somehow mess up EAX? Do I need to run something first like ALchemy to make EAX work? I thought it was as easy as click the box and start gaming...but silly me it isn't. I now know EAX is a largely dead technology, but it irks me highly that it isn't working properly on the games that support it - I'd really like to sample it first hand but either it makes a miniscule difference or it's not on..