Comment 5 for bug 370553

I'll proceed presuming that you want your SB Live to be the default card always, and we'll call that hw:0 for alsa-kernel and alsa-lib.

You should make these two modifications:

1) Open a Terminal, and issue: echo options snd slots=snd-emu10k1,snd-hda-intel|sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/always_sblive_default.conf

2) Edit your ~/.asoundrc to read as follows:
# ALSA library configuration file

# Include settings that are under the control of asoundconf(1).
# (To disable these settings, comment out this line.)
#</home/theman/.asoundrc.asoundconf>
# http://ph.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?s=1624d7a5cf7d26ee1f34a9bf732a92cd&t=161817&page=3
pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave.pcm "surround51"
  slave.channels 4
  route_policy duplicate
}

(Essentially, you don't want ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf at all. You can erase it if doing so suits you.)

After you've made the above two modifications, you may either reboot or issue "sudo /sbin/alsa force-reload" to effect the changes.