Sound won't move on Windows, works fine on OSX and Linux

[Naug]

New member here with a question.

Me and my friend have started a project to make a space game. The goal is to make it crossplatform so we chose Java as our programming language and I have been investigating audio libraries for the game. OpenAL seemed like the most obvious one but we've run into some trouble. I looked to see if anyone else had resolved this issue but no luck.

The goal in this exercise is to make a sound source grow more distant over time by moving it away from the listener. When I try this on my friend's linux laptop it works fine. It works fine on my macbook pro as well but on my stationary windows machine back home, the sound source simply wont move. Even setting its position manually in the initialization to ridiculous values like 1000.0f or 10000.0f doesn't change the output one bit its still at full volume and played evenly in both ears(not just the depth that is a problem but also moving the sound from left to right does not work).

I used the code from Lesson 2 of the OpenAL tutorial on this site (this code here) with one minor change to the timer arithmetic as the Sys.getTime() did not play nice with me in the original code.

I have no error logs or crash reports to forward as this problem does not generate any.
The machine is running Windows 7 64-bit and is using a SB X-fi Extreme Audio sound card.

We'd be grateful for any insight