Mint 12: Sound distortion with Audigy 2/5.1 surround

[haggholm]

Sound output was horribly, horribly disorted – setting output to analog stereo via the system settings -> sound fixed the issue, but of course leaves me with stereo output. The problem appears somewhat intermittent in that it worked fine, then after rebooting it was horrible – as such I’m not sure how easily I will be able to reproduce it (time will tell, I suppose). It seems to follow a general trend of awfulness accompanying PulseAudio and there are all too many people out there suggesting various ways of manually disabling PA, but I’m a bit concerned about where that drastic solution would leave me on the upgrade path…