I realize this is a repeated question, I just was not able to rectify the issue myself.
Anyways, I have a laptop running Ubuntu 13.04. It does not have a 5.1 sound card installed, but I have 5.1 speakers. So I purchased a USB sound card (Sound Blaster X Fi).
It works 'out of the box' with pulseaudio, only issue is any output other than stereo will cause static crackling. I've attempted to remove pulseaudio and use ALSA with gnome-alsamixer and even xfe4-mixer, neither correctly installed and would revert to my laptops speakers.
Currently just running Pulseaudio in stereo output, but it's a waste. If I can't fix this, probably going to go back to Windows 7.