You might want to contact a post production facility that caters to 5.1 and contract them to do the job from your files.

To successfully set up for 5.1 is gonna be in the $30k range... minimum... to design and set your room up, new DAW, converters, monitors, controllers and then there's the 6 months of proper planning and likely another 2-3 months of demolition and reconstruction. To do the job as quickly as possible, you WILL hafta contract someone... That's gonna impact the price as well, and if it's rush?!?!? I'd estimate worst case should be no more than $200k. Oh, and don't forget the learning curve... plus learning/finding/executing the standards for duplication/replication aren't exactly the same as stereo.... so you're automatically moving to DVD... and broadcast standards to get it to play on a DVD player, etc...

Wow! That's more that what we had in mind. But would that be for starting from scratch, recording through the whole process? Because our project seems simpler to me.

I will be provided sound bytes that are 10-15 second clips of sounds effects and speech. They already have all of that recording done and ready to go. Then I'm supposed to put them together in a track and point different sound bytes to different channels. For instance, they might say they want 10 second byte "A" to play out of right front at the 20 second mark. Then they want 8 second sound byte "B" to play out of left rear at the 35 second mark. Then sound byte "C" to play out of the center channel... and so on.

I've done jobs putting sound bytes together in a track like this for commercials and training videos. It was easy. The only difference here is that I need to point each sound byte to a specific surround channel. Would we really need a huge set up or is there software that works with surround channels like I need? Adobe Audition / Soundbooth makes it simple for 5.1:

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://help.adobe.c…"]Adobe Audition * 5.1 surround sound[/]="http://help.adobe.c…"]Adobe Audition * 5.1 surround sound[/]

But won't go higher to 7.1, 9.1, or 11.1 and I might need to do so. Is there any software like this that will go past 5.1 that you are aware of?

For all of your better options, I'd contact the major post house equipment distributors... Since you have no idea what encoding you want to do, you're still looking at some fairly expensive hardware and software.