The Source wrote:
You can't hear desktop sounds because they always use pulseaudio no matter what sound system you select as default. For me pulseaudio plays first sound fine after start, others are corrupt along with sound from all other apps. I'll post hw_params later. Also pulseaudio tends to crash often with this driver so I suppose your problem is the same.
Can confirm that once pulse (on FC9 at least) gets involved it sounds terrible.
I worked out that I had removed a package pulseaudio-esound-compat at some point in the past and never realised that it contains the symlinks that gets Gnome to start the pulse server. Once that was fixed the desktop effects started working but only out of my USB headset... and nothing I can find in the gui lets me do anything about it.
mplayer and firefox/flash sound terrible, very tinny and scratchy. This is with the base_rate=48000 option set in modprobe.conf
Thanks, Jason