Having fun with a custom kernel and all seems to be good, but could someone tell me if I need to have ALSA installed. I have compiled my sound card drivers into the kernel, and have sound in KDE, but on boot, I get an error message reporting that ALSA can not find the driver. With my limited knowledge, I am assuming that the KDE sound server is functioning because I have the driver in the kernel, but I am guessing that I have no access to the command line sound as ALSA was unable to load the required driver? Are there any pro's or con's relating to ALSA?

Try at the command line : alsamixer
If the audio mixer works, you have alsa running correctly in your system

Cheers keefaz, have tried alsaconf which does not detect any hardware, so I delieve that alsamixer would not work, but admittedly I have not tried it. That actual error referring to the ALSA module is in dmesg. Will supply full details later as I am at work at the moment.

If you compiled alsa as built-in in the kernel, obviously alsa script complain that
it can't find any alsa modules. You don't need alsaconf when your sound is
built-in. Just try alsamixer (also if your sound works in KDE, alsa works for sure)