Comment 9 for bug 608876

I'm having a similar (no sound problem with Ear Candy (EC) (the dev version from the PPA). It seems that EC sets the application's volume to zero (and it's volume to full), resulting in no sound. Manually changing the apps volume (e.g. for Totem) just results in a battle for the app volume that EC wins, continually pushing it back to zero. For apps that give me the option (Mplayer, VLC) and can change the audio component from pulse to alsa and it all works as expected, but this is not (IMHO) a satisfactory workaround.
So it's goodbye to EC and back to manually moving streams to the USB head set.

(AMD64, Lucid,
 $ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: VT2020 Analog [VT2020 Analog]
  Subdevices: 2/2
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: VT2020 Digital [VT2020 Digital]
  Subdevices: 2/2
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1