Macbook Pro to Surround Help Needed

I'm moving away to uni in a few days and need a way of linking my Macbook Pro to my Surround Sound as I am not taking my PC Desktop. I've heard that older models of the Macbook Pro don't have good enough sound cards to support 5.1 but I have the 15" core i5 model prior to the latest updates, so maybe the sound card has been improved?

If anyone knows a way to do this, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading!

you need an external soundcard for 5.1 audio. All current MBPs still use stereo out.

I may be wrong about this, but I was under the impression that MacBooks/MBPs have for many years now supported optical audio out through the headphone jack and thus can handle multi-channel sound. You need a special adapter, but I have plenty of reports of people using MBPs for quite a number of years now doing 5.1 surround, and the 2011 model at least supports 7.1 surround, or so I'm told by people who should know.

I know my 2007 Macbook has optical out via the headphone jack.

All models of the MBP do indeed support 5.1 audio out via optical.

The issue is that you will only get 5.1 from 5.1 sources, such as watching a DVD or iTunes/Amazon/etc. movie rentals/purchases that have 5.1 audio.

There is no Dolby /DTS built in, so you will not get a faux 5.1 from any of your stereo sources such as probably all of your music. If you want that, you'll need to connect it to computer speakers or a receiver with those features built in.

I run optical out from my '06 model MBP to my Onkyo using straight through settings with movies and using the Onkyo's Dolby/DTS features to "create" 5.1 when listening to my music.

Of course, you cannot get 5.1 out using the analog 3.5 mm "stereo" mini-plug. You must use a mini toslink to toslink connector.

If you want 5.1 analog out, then as rob noted, you will require either an external sound card or a toslink to analog converter box. The sound card will be the cheaper option.