Pulseaudio expects clients to specify their channel-map if the
default (ALSA) map does not route the audio to the expected speakers.

Many Google results suggest dealing with this by re-routing the audio
channels with the appropriate ALSA plugin, but this will then simply
break any clients which expect the default ALSA mapping.

Virtually all media files and codecs, certainly flac, dca, a52, and of
course anything based on Microsoft's WAVEFORMAT_EXTENSIBLE specification,
assume the layout in the table here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surround_sound#Standard_speaker_channels

Fortunately, pulseaudio directly addresses this with a built-in channel
map for WAVE-EX which can be set automatically in the stream sample-spec.