I've been going around and around on this. The surround sound 5.1 is playing fine except channel 0 (front-left) is playing on the woofer. The card is a Terratec Aureon fun - CMI8738-MC6. I have gotten desperate and have tested this card in Windows and was able to get it working right there. I have been using speaker-test to to test the setup. I am using pulseaudio.
This is the summary of my results with speaker-test:
speaker-test -c 6 -D surround51 -t wav speaker output ---------------------- front L silence front R front R center center bass mix of front L + bass surround L surround L surround R surround R
speaker-test -c 4 -D surround40 -t wav ---------------------------------------------------- front L silence front R front R center silence bass mix of front L + bass rear L rear L rear R rear R
speaker-test -c 4 -t wav speaker-test -c 6 -t wav speaker -test -c 2 -t wav --------------------------------- front L silence front R front R center silence bass mix of front L + bass rear L silence rear R silence
I have removed pulseaudio again (recompiled all software with optional pulseaudio support without pulseaudio support) I should be outputting directly to alsa and the driver now.
Under pulseaudio speaker-test gives error messages when surround40 and surround51 is specified.
Thanks Tom