Comment 3 for bug 396716

well, if you have to use the audio group there is definately something wrong in the alsa device setup, ubuntu does neither use nor support the audio group anymore since 9.04 in its default setup, using it will give you direct device access to devices that will differ from the ones the pulse backend accesses.

it is a bug in the alsa implementation in the kernel, in SGTL5000 itself, or even only a wrong kernel configuration which is supposed to be handled and fixed in bug 420447

while it is nice to know that you have a workaround by enabling the audio group please understand that we are mostly concerned to get the supposed default setup to function bugfree.