Comment 2 for bug 441746

OK, I have this figured out, I was misreading the little green blocks as meaning muted instead of unmuted. The whole time IEC958 was unmuted, but still not working. All it took to turn on ICE958 was to unmute the "master" channel in the alsamixer command line utility.

The question now is why isn't this enabled by default? Is the master (and most all of the other channels) being disabled a configuration mistake in the Pulse Audio 'profiles"? These alsamixer configurations still have a lot of importance apparently, and the Pulse Audio GUIs cannot configure them currently. Normally, turning on/off optical is done with the ICE958 switch in the old Gnome controls or in alsamixer, but now this has absolutely no effect. Only muting/unmuting "master" turns it off and on, but only in alsamixer. Is this because it is supposed to be linked to Pulse Audio's master mute/unmute, but currently is broken perhaps? While master is unmuted in alsamixer, muting in Pulse Audio will work, so you will only get sound if both PA and ALSA are unmuted.

So, this bug report problem has changed to: "alsamixer master channel not unmuted by default" I guess. :)

Thanks.