5.1 Audio in qlab

[Ian Scott]

I have 5.1 surround sound system (Logitech z906) connected to a Macbook pro with a fibre optic cable . I need to be able to have sounds coming out of different speakers  eg a scream coming out of the Rear Left Speaker. How am I able to achieve this in qlab 

[Paul Gotch]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the short answer is you can't
with that setup.

The long answer is that the connection is via TOSLINK which is
fundamentally a 2 channel interface. 5.1 is achieved by sending a lossy
compressed non-audio stream, usually Dolby AC3 or DTS across, which is
then decoded at the other end.

QLab needs to be able to see discrete outputs, therefore those outputs
would need to be encoded before being sent. This would do nasty things
to latency and also isn't feasible due to the licensing fees demanded by
Dolby for encoders.

Your speakers have a 6 channel discrete analogue input, the cheapest way
to get multiple chanels would be to buy an ESI Gigaport HD, which is
pretty much the cheapest multi channel audio interface on the market,
and plug it in the analogue inputs on your speaker system.

-p