Comment 9 for bug 217789

After intense amounts of experimentation (and googling) I found a post which suggested that this was related to pulseaudio (and that their removal of it fixed a similar problem.) Since half my system depends on pulseaudio, its not easily removable but I see that others simply killed it and removed the reference to it from /etc/asound.conf

Turns out I didn't do either, but rather just used "alsamixer -c 0" and two of the sliders were set real low (despite the Pulseaudio volume control being maxed on every channel. I cranked those up, and all of a sudden my speakers have life :)

Yes, I'm a bit red-faced, but maybe this will help somebody else with a simple fix. I don't remember seeing those channels in the console-based alsamixer before, so its possible that Peter's fix enabled me to see those?

Thanks to all!