ALSA, PulseAudio and 5.1 surround sound

[cogadh]

I finally got surround sound working properly with ALSA on my machine when I discovered that ESD couldn't handle sound properly with some games. I found that using the PulseAudio ESD compatibility package would fix that problem, but it broke the surround sound functions. I haven't been able to find anything definitive about using PulseAudio in a surround sound situation, so I hope someone here can help.

Basically to get surround sound working originally, I created an .asoundrc file with the following:

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "surround51"
    slave.channels 6
    route_policy duplicate
}

After doing this, I was able to get the stereo sound replicated across all 6 channels for normal audio playback and I can get applications to use the "surround51" plug for audio from 5.1 sources (DVD movies and the like).

After installing the pulseaudio and pulseaudio-esound-compat packages, stereo sound is back to only coming from the front two channels instead of replicated across all 6 channels and running the ALSA speaker test produces results like this:

cogadh@ubuntu-desktop:~$ speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav

speaker-test 1.0.14

Playback device is plug:surround51
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 6 channels
WAV file(s)
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy

The playback open error occurs repeatedly until I kill the speaker test. The PulseAudio documentation at http://pulseaudio.org/ did not help at all, as it doesn't seem to cover any situation involving surround sound. Anybody have any suggestions on how to fix this?