ok this probably will answer itself in the asking but here goes. i have just installed the alsa drivers in red hat 7.2 following the instructions to the letter with one exeption , i have yet to put the module options in modules.conf.

now after doing this and rebooting i have noticed that the sound mixer has now got controls for things like cd audio, wav,midi ect where as before they were'nt there.

i can now sucessfuly play music cds and thats it. is the reason because the module options are nessasary for the rest of the sound to work?

the modules options i think are for programs to load
the right modules when the kernel tries to load them.
you can get away without the options if you load the
correct modules in some boot file or by hand.