Comment 3 for bug 29597

alsaconf was originally removed from Ubuntu because it broke the module-init-tools configuration in terrible ways.

According to one of the Debian alsa-utils maintainers, alsaconf is planned for removal from Debian as well. It is no longer needed for configuring the ALSA drivers. Its only remaining use is for debugging. If your sound doesn't work out of the box, but works after running alsaconf, this is a bug which should be reported.