Comment 8 for bug 426788

I experienced similar problems after I installed Karmic - but only after I removed my old Pulse config, which seemed to be inhibiting the volume control applet from listing the hardware. After this, hardware was displayed, but selecting any profile (eg Analogue 5.1 Surround) resulted in the distorted sound which has been mentioned in the ubuntuforums (Search for distorted sound).

Selecting any Analogue 4.1 output turned some of the distortion down, but not by much.

I've resorted to installing OSS and using ossxmix to manage my audio, and even this seemed not to work, then did after some reboots, and also gave me half a minute or so of distortion when I changed a track in Rythmbox (but when I did the same song change again, no distortion happened)

For the record: lspci | grep audio:
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)

The adapter is the on board 7.1 sound of an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard. I'm upgrading this in a few days. If I can get Pulse or the volume controls working again, I'll post back.

I've also never seemed to be able to change the individual channel volumes in any flavour of Ubuntu successfully - but in that other common operating system, I had no troubles. I think I was using a realtek configuration utility, which was able to adjust any of the 8 channels perfectly. (always on the above mentioned motherboard / sound card)