I've spent most of today looking into this. All testing was against wine
1.3.10.

My system uses a Gigabyte X58A-UD9 MB with on-board Realtek ALC889 sound
connected to a Logitech Z-5500 5.1 system via analogue, and I'm running
Ubuntu 10.04.

Under the Sound Preferences Hardware tab, I have selected "Analog
Surround 5.1 Output".

When I run the command “speaker-test -c6 -l1 -twav” everything plays
exactly as expected. I've also added the following line to my
/etc/pulse/daemon.conf file to disable channel remixing:

enable-remixing = no

Otherwise it's not always immediately obvious if games are actually
supporting multi-channel or not. Additionally, my bare-bones ALSA config
file redirects everything to PulseAudio by default.

I've mostly tested games with ALSA selected in winecfg, but tried a
couple of games with the WinePulse patches and using PulseAudio directly
to see if it made a difference. It didn't.

The results:

In Portal, selecting 5.1 reverts back to stereo after freezing for a few
seconds. Selecting a multi-channel sound configuration is not possible
(sounds like the Team Fortress 2 report above).

StarCraft 1 certainly didn't output anything to my rear channels, as
expected from previous comments here.

StarCraft II, looked promising (I can select 5.1 from the drop-down
successfully) but it actually seems to do nothing (no audio was heard
from the rear channels). I tested as much as the menus and game cut-
scenes.

UT2004 and Killing Floor (a UT2004-based game) also didn't run multi-
channel, even after adjusting some of the audio settings in-game.

Aliens Vs Predator was only stereo, and doesn't provide an option to
tweak anything useful audio-related in-game.

Despite all these failures, Unreal Tournament 3 multi-channel audio
actually worked effortlessly. You can clearly hear menu click sound
effects in the rear speakers, and surround sound in-game appears to work
perfectly (I played a few matches to test it out – using the patch for
bug 6971 of course).

Given that UT3 worked, I tried Stranglehold (UT3-based), but that
*didn't* work. There wasn't much in the way of in-game options there.
Perhaps if I had more time I could try diff'ing the UT*.ini and
Stranglehold ini files... don't know.

I've got plenty of other games I could try, but that's it for now. Very
curious to know what's so special about UT3. Either way, it would be
awesome to improve multi-channel sound compatibility. I personally don't
care about EAX.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/344588

Title:
  Wine doesn't support 5.1 and 7.1 sound

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