Proper 5.1 Sound Hardware for Surround Sound Monitoring and Mixing

We have an intrinsic distrust of anything Creative Labs have done with audio - goes back years to when they lied pretty comprehensively about what their SoundBlaster cards were capable of, ending up with a class action against them. It was quite depressing to find that in a list of supposedly 'top ten' surround-capable cards for Macs, Creative Labs accounted for the majority of them.

Apparently, what people often do about getting 5.1 out of Macbooks is to use the HDMI connection, and that will allow you to extract anything up to 8 channels of audio. How exactly you get it to separate individual outputs rather depends on how you intercept the output, but it's perfectly possible to do this. Also people have gone down the route of using three stereo USB adaptors - apparently you can aggregate these into effectively a single 5.1 device. The good thing about doing it this way is that you don't invoke the other Creative Labs problem - bloatware drivers and a load of crap installed that you don't want on your system.

I'd say that initially, you might wish to do a little more research into this. For instance, if you wish to have more direct inputs available to record from, then you'll need a more capable sound device anyway. It will cost you more, but might be worth it. Also you need to be aware that Audition won't be able to encode individual channels into any of the standard distribution channels on its own - you'd need a separate encode-decode system for that. And that's before even considering how you are going to monitor this accurately...