Comment 27 for bug 1773167

I think it's a real fix. Not a nice fix, but the fact is that things will break in PulseAudio if alsa defines "front" to be the same as "hdmi". Strictly speaking "front" is allowed to be any device that has a front-left,front-right channel map, but in practice it shouldn't overlap with other device definitions, because PulseAudio needs to tell analog and HDMI devices apart. There's no separate definition for analog devices, so PulseAudio assumes that "front" is analog, and usually that assumption is correct.

I'll send the patch to the alsa developers. Thanks for testing!