The thing I missed the most after switching to Mac was foobar2000 media player and it’s Channel Mixer plugin. The DSP lets you upmix 2.0 to 5.1 via various methods e.g. creating surround channels or simply copying front to rear, mixing left and right to center and redirecting bass to LFE. What is more there there is also speaker delay management which allows you to keep sound you hear from 6 speakers in same phase – it really makes a difference.
As I switched to the MacBook and Mac OS X of course, I had stereo only audio as I my speaker set doesn’t have optical input. Recently I bought cheap 5.1 USB sound card which works well with Leopard 10.5.8. Unfortunately, there was still 2.0 audio from iTunes – until I combined power of JackOSX and AU Lab
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