https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38497
--- Comment #14 from Andrew Eikum aeikum@codeweavers.com --- Looking at your log, I was wondering if that was the case :) Your recent log uses 2 channels instead of 6 like the old log.
There was only one large change between 1.7.39 and 1.7.41, which was the channel configuration UI in winecfg was redesigned to be easier to understand. Possibly you were interpreting the old UI incorrectly (see Bug 38006), and it was set up for 5.1 mode all along.
If it's OK with you, I think we'll close this as INVALID.
That said, I do think we should default to Stereo unless we're more certain about the user's physical speaker setup. Stereo is by far the most common configuration, so I think we'd have less user confusion if we just used Stereo most of the time.