Premiere not recognizing surround sound audio hardware

The devs have explained in several posts that Premiere works vis Asio on PC for surround. And have said the same thing at NAB.

Why? No clue.

I actually tried ASIO4All first and that didn't work at all for me. I had to use the VB Audio Matrix instead. 

However, if you're suggesting that you need ASIO to make use of multichannel output at all in Premiere, that's incorrect. There was actually one session where I was able to get it to work with the Sonar device through the MME output, but it only worked that one time. So Premiere is absolutely capable of seeing the device as multichannel output. 

The reason I mention that it works in literally every other program that exists, is because it demonstrates that those programs don't need to do something special to recognize the additional channels. It looks no different to those apps than if you had a traditional multichannel sound card with 3 or 4 output jacks. So that's why I find it odd that Premiere doesn't. 

Surely this is not the intended behavior, hence why I filed it as a bug.

Again, you have to use Asio4all to get surround sound out of Premiere. How other apps behave is "immaterial" for working in Premiere.

Frustrating as that is at times.

Every other program that does surround sound, including older games, works fine with the Sonar device. The Sonar device doesn't show up on the ASIO section of premiere, so I didn't think it was related to ASIO at all. 

Premiere can see and use the device just fine, it just can't output surround sound through it, even though every other program seems to have no problem with that.

As this is based off an Asio under-coding, Premiere doesn't 'see' it. So the one listed above, or Asio4All, are needed on the computer for Premiere to access any Asio based devices.

I found a temporary solution until Adobe fixes this, a program called VB Audio Matrix:

https://vb-audio.com/Matrix/index.htm

It creates a fake ASIO device which you can set Premiere to output to, and then use the VB Matrix app to map the 8 ASIO channels to the 8 channels on the audio device. Premiere recognizes the 8 channel ASIO correctly, so it works