[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#609441: Here are some important notes from the ALSA team

[Karsten Malcher]

There is an answer in the bug report at ALSA.
It seems to point out the problem what is going wrong in Debian:

===========================================

This is not ALSA 's bug, ask you distribution maintainer provide a 
solution to revert the change for those user who don't want to pulseaudio,

1) remove the entry "pcm.!default" and "ctl.!default" created by pulseaudio
2) configure libcanberra to use alsa
3) use alsamixer-qt4 instead of kmix

(i.e. PA and phonon cannot co-exit because phonon is designed to use 
"default:card=Intel" to open pcm device

after you installed pulseaudio which override "pcm.!default" by type pulse


phonon will lost the capability to use "default:card" device ,

this default device is using card specific feature defined in 
/usr/share/alsa/cards/*.conf

"dmix" for sound cards does not support hardware mixing
"hw" for hardware mixing sound cards e.g. cs4630

output of "aplay -L" no longer as same as before


~$ aplay -L
null
     Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
default:CARD=default
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     Default Audio Device
front:CARD=default,DEV=0
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     Front speakers
surround40:CARD=default,DEV=0
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=default,DEV=0
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=default,DEV=0
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=default,DEV=0
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=default,DEV=0
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=default,DEV=0
     PnP Audio Device , USB Audio
     IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output