Need help with external sound card (not getting 5.1 in Audio Midi Setup)

[BigDaddy5]

I'm using a sound blaster extigy, and everywhere I read says this card will work with OS X. I'm running 10.5.1, and I can only get stereo output. Does anybody have any advice to get OS X to recognize this as a 5.1 channel card? Audio MIDI Setup only shows me an option for "Stereo," and all the rest are grayed out.

If there is no way to do that, does anybody have any suggestions for 5.1 channel cards like this one? I need to have individual outputs, so I can get traktor to run through seperate channels like this one. I did it with PCDJ on Windows before I switched to Mac, but now I'm having no luck.

 

[ridehard]

same here, got the z-5500 with optical cable with mini toslink and only get the stereo. In dvd player i get 5.1 output .
Under windows only stereo.

 

[AviationFan]

I don't know this specific sound card, but I do recall that as a general rule, 5.1 output over Toslink is possible ONLY for the DVD player because the audio is then already encoded as AC3 (Dolby Digital). Mac OS does not include a realtime AC3 encoder, so for all other purposes (other than DVDs) you'd need to have an audio interface with six separate outputs, uncompressed and typically analog.

Maybe this helps...

- Martin