How can you change the default audio output in VLC to 5.1?

I felt the need to resurrect this as it’s pretty high up on search results and the solution no longer works for v2.0.2—however, I finally found a fix!

1. Press Ctrl+P to bring up preferences.
2. At the bottom of the right-hand navigation select the All radio-button under the Show settings area (bottom left of the interface).
3. Now expand the Audio tree, select Out Modules and select DirectX.
4. Select your "Output device" and "Speaker configuration" from the drop down menus.
5. Restart VLC.

This was a bit confusing for me as well. I have 7.1 audio on my system. VLC always defaulted to stereo audio. Then I finally figured it out. You must have your sound cards speaker configuration set to 5.1 or else VLC will not choose the 5.1 track. I thought that 7.1 set for speaker configuration on my sound card would work for anything so the system would play 5.1 or 7.1 if available. But apparently with VLC, and maybe some other programs, your system must match exactly or it will not recognize your settings. This is a feature that the VideoLan team needs to fix. With the advent of 7.1 audio VLC needs to recognize that it can play 5.1 audio on a 7.1 system.

From vlc --longhelp --advanced:

  --force-dolby-surround {0 (Auto), 1 (On), 2 (Off)}
                             Force detection of Dolby Surround

There's also the respective setting in the GUI version of the settings under "Audio->Effects->Dolby Surround". Is has the options "Auto", "On" and "Off".

From what I understand, it should automatically detect whether the source media is surround sound or not.