I have an Asus A8N-E motherboard with onboard Realtek ALC850 sound. I use the SPDIF port with my stereo. I had it working fine in Kubuntu 5.10, kernel 2.6.12-10, but all of a sudden it stopped working. I've tried a lot of stuff, things which previously worked, but nothing helped. So I completely reinstalled Kubuntu, but it still doesn't work. The applications think they're outputting audio, but it's not coming out of any port on the motherboard, not even the analog ports.

lsmod and lspci show everything that they should, and alsaconf detects the card. Alsamixer works and I've set the IEC958 volume to zero.

What else can I try?

Try to umute all channel and set these volume above 80%.
If it still refuse to work, check your speaker.

Still no sound. The speakers are fine, it all works from Windows XP. Any other ideas? Remember, it was working fine previously so I know everything is supported by my distro.

It works. I was randomly changing things around, and it started working. But I remember already trying the current settings before.

Is there any way to take a snapshot of every setting related to sound? I would like it for future reference when the sound stops working again.