I've repurposed a 5.1 surround system my wife bought on a whim because she liked the sound of the Elvis song they were playing through it in PC World a couple of years ago. In the Realtek HD Audio Manager, each playback sound comes from the correct indicated speaker.
There does seem to be the odd glitch, though. The sound of lasers firing seems to come from the rear speakers, and there are times when I can see incoming hits on the ship shield display but there's no audio of the hits themselves.
It's not an Elite-only problem, I get it in CS:GO too, so I was wondering if there's a way to correctly configure a surround system for gaming? It seems to me that there are deadspots where the driver doesn't know which speaker to use, so it doesn't use any...