Hi, recently I've been ripping some music from a couple of my anime DVDs, the music in question being either unreleased or English dubbed OP/ED themes. However a little while back I started noticing that older animes typically have audio channels of 2.0 Stereo while more recent ones and some remastered re-releases sometimes have 5.1 Surround.

Basically I wanted to find out if the way I've been going about it will keep it from losing any quality, with that said I'll have to explain how I've gone about it thus far. Firstly I haven't been doing line-in recordings, I instead use a program that makes a MKV or M4V copy of the dvd and then use another program to compress the file and cut out the chapters I don't need. I however put the audio options to the max settings since it's the only factor that matters in this scenario. Afterwards I put it into Adobe Premiere and make it into a WAV and it's around here I start to have a question or two.

Basically, the only options I'm aware of regarding the audio channels when making them into WAVs are mono and stereo. While that should be fine for the ones that are 2.0 Stereo I was wondering if that'll "downgrade" the ones which are in 5.1 Surround, if so is there a way to to encode the Wavs into 5.1?

I've been having a friend whom is a lot more music savvy than I assisting me with this but sadly he doesn't know much about 5.1 and since I've been having difficulty finding a precise answer regarding this I figured I'd attempt just asking to see if anyone knew.

I know nothing about Adobe Premiere, but WAVs can easily be multichannel files. I assume Premiere is a smart enough program to be able to export to surround WAV files, though you may have to search through the program's options to tell it not to downmix to stereo/mono all the time.