Comment 4 for bug 653420

Yes this is reproducible with a clean (unmodified) /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

I also noticed that only this line is really needed for the hack:
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m4-1 enable_msi=1

If that helps narrow it down a bit, apparently its because my sound card is very similar to the dell one.