I have an SB Audigy Platinum Soundcard.
When i first installed Ubuntu i had no sound. I went to the multimedia systems selector and tried all 3 sound engines. They all said:

Failed to construct test pipeline for 'Sound Engine Here'

I went into the root terminal and tried to mess with the sound engines. I forced esd to use the specified device

esd -d /dev/dsp1

It was trying to use "dsp" which was nonexistent.
After that the esd system worked, until i rebooted.
Is this the problem with the other sound systems?
Are they trying to access a device which is non-existent or is it some other problem?
I really need to use ALSA for my recording and i tried fudging around in the alsa config files to no avail.
So if anyone knows how to get alsa working correctly i would greatly appreciate it.

Try running the command lsmod (as root) and see if the module for your card is loaded. I believe for an audigy the module is named emu10k1 or something like that. If it's not in the list, run the command modprobe emu10k1.