How many sound channels does LoL have? Can I get real 5.1?

Hi folks,

I have a wonderful Logitech Z906 set of speakers and I'm using it to enjoy movies with real surround sound. It worked pretty much out of the box with my Blu-Ray player so I didn't look too much into it, but lately I've been trying to get surround sound out of as many applications as I can on my computer, and it's been a hell of a ride. Surround sound is a deep, deep rabbit hole, even if you don't consider all the bugs in the software (or the hardware!) that make it so difficult to get right.

So before I start trying to make surround sound work for League, my question is: is it even worth it, as in: can League output multiple sound channels? or only stereo?

I'm not interested in "virtual surround", i.e. Dolby Pro Logic or that kind of nonsense. If I only have stereo sources, I'll keep doing what I'm doing now for League and the majority of my applications, i.e. sending stereo PCM directly to my receiver (via S/PDIF), and the Z906 handles stereo very well, giving me 4.1 or 3D Surround (i.e. virtual surround) if I want it to, and that's fine with me - its 4.1 kicks major ass.

What I'm interested in is real surround, i.e. transmitting 5+1 channels directly to my Z906 via S/PDIF. If I have a DTS- or AC3-encoded stream, I can do it via passthrough: that's how my movie player works with DVDs, for instance. If I don't have such a stream, but I do have several sources of sound, that's okay too: I have ac3filter installed, and it can do the encoding for me. That's how my movie player works with AAC-encoded streams: it decodes the AAC, if the content is stereo, then it sends PCM, and if the contents is 5.1, it sends it to ac3filter which re-encodes it into a format that will go over the S/PDIF and that my Z906 can decode.

I have to say that understanding exactly how everything works, how stuff plugged into other stuff, and getting everything to work right again after breaking it to experiment was a major pain in the butt because interactions between applications, DirectSound, Windows 10 and my sound card's drivers and software are horribly buggy and fickle. So I'm only touching that stuff if it's worth it, i.e. I have at least 4 sound channels to work with, not just 2.

So:

• how many sound channels does League output? And if it has more than two:
• where can I tell League what device to use for its sound, and how can I tweak the config?

Thanks for any sound inputs you may have! (ba-dum ksh)