Comment 2 for bug 286805

I also have a multi channel soundcard and found that a default installation of Intrepid resulted in both alsamixer and the desktop 'volume control' applet seeing only a single channel.

Like JiangWei I can confirm that alsamixer is given the ability to see multiple channels if I remove the line containing '/usr/share/alsa/pulse.conf' from /usr/share/alsa.conf and then restart alsa-utils.

The removal of the pulse audio config file doesn't feel like much of a fix to me since it looks like Intrepid is set up to use pulse deliberately - hence I wanted to ask if there is a more 'correct' fix for this? e.g. is there a pulse audio control panel somewhere which I should be using instead? I have tried changing just about everything I can think of in both the 'volume control' and 'sound preferences' desktop applets to no avail.