I have a usb audio device (Griffin iMic) which I am using to stream audio from usb to a codec which is connected to speakers or headphones. I noticed that when I use ALSA utilities to do this that the audio for each channel was hopping back and forth. To verify this I used Audacity from my PC to create a 440 Hz tone and scrolled the balance to be either only left or only right channel audio and when I listened through headphones I heard the tone hopping back and forth between sides with some static everytime it switched. I am using the following command:

arecord -Dhw:1 -fcd | aplay

Does anyone know why arecord or aplay would be causing this channel swapping? I tried multiple verions of alsa-utils package (1.0.11rc2, 1.0.11rc4, 1.0.14) and observed the same results for each. Is there a conflict the way I am piping from stdout to stdin?