Comment 7 for bug 926688

Just installed Mint xfce and having same problem with maintaining sound settings. Pulse audio wiki gives this.

Pulseaudio usually overwrites the ALSA settings- for example set with alsamixer- at start up, even when the alsa daemon is loaded. Since there seems to be no other way to restrict this behaviour, a workaround is to restore the alsa settings again after pulseaudio had started. Add the following command to .xinitrc .bash_login or any other autostart file:

restore_alsa() {
 while [ -z "`pidof pulseaudio`" ]; do
  sleep 0.5
 done
 alsactl -f /var/lib/alsa/asound.state restore
}
restore_alsa &
could not find either of these filed but appended to end of user .profile and it works.
Would adding this to .profile programatically solve the issue