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Back in 2010, I put together a small guide as to how to enable 5.1-channel audio in OS X and it's high time to update it. As such, we did a screencast this time that provides a better overview as to what steps you have to take to get multi-channel analogue audio out of your CustoMac. There are a few pre-requisites though which will go over quickly to start with.For starters you need to have working audio and in this case we're talking multiple outputs. It's possible to create less and potentially more than 6-channels of audio, it simply depends on how many outputs OS X detects. One way would be to use multiple USB audio interfaces, but this is something we haven't actually tested. Generally speaking, if you have onboard Realtek audio, you should be able to get this working quite easily. Secondly, system sounds will continue to be in stereo, but multi-channel encoded audio in say a movie will work as intended.
Head over the Utilities folder and start the Audio Midi Setup utility, as this is what will allow you to set things up. As you can see in the video below, the next step is to click on the plus [+] sign and select Create Aggregate Device. This will add a new audio device and we re-named it 5.1-channel audio to reflect what it does.
The next step is to select all the outputs available, or at least enough outputs to create the desired amount of audio channels. In this case we selected three output devices. The selected devices should appear if you click the small triangle next to the large blue plus sign and this means that we're ready for the next step.
[video=youtube;po-_c7eHrkg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po-_c7eHrkg[/video]
Click on the Configure Speakers… button and a new menu will appear. Click on Multichannel and select 5.1 Surround from the dropdown menu (as you can see, other options are also available here). Finally you need to select the three Stream devices at the top, as each stream is assigned to a specific speaker. You can manually adjust which stream goes to which speaker, something that might be handy for example if the sub and centre speakers are reversed. Click apply and then Done and you're almost set to go.
The final step is to Control/right click on the aggregated device and select Use this device for sound output and Play alerts and sound effects through this device. This means that you don't have to muck around and swap between the stereo output for non-surround sound audio sources and all the system sounds will play through your front speakers. The only thing you lose this way is software volume control, but usually you'd have some kind of volume control on your speakers anyhow.
As pointed out in the original guide, for those of you that want to use the S/PDIF out, select it as the output device in the Sound settings in System Preferences, play back some audio and it should start working. Hopefully you've found this updated version of my multi-channel audio guide useful. Any feedback is welcome in the comments below, especially if you spot any mistakes.
Related:
Universal 5.1-channel analogue audio
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