Comment 52 for bug 344588

There shouldn't be any need to set up Wine to use multi-channel audio. Except in the case of dsound, if an application supports it and your ALSA configuration is set up correctly, it should just work. I had the best results when using PulseAudio, as PA deals with most of the ALSA configuration for you.

After dsound is repaired, I'll do a more thorough investigation of the different setups and try to find what works best. For example, many ALSA configurations define devices like "surround51" or "surround40", which might work better, but would have to be added manually with the ALSAOutputDevices registry key (see <http://wiki.winehq.org/Sound>).