https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28030
--- Comment #5 from sean finney seanius@debian.org 2010-05-10 13:26:13 PDT --- okay, this is really interesting... when the system starts up after booting/rebooting, the audio does not work. attempting to play to the alsa audio device will result in various errors having to do with sysctl requests *but*, if i restart the graphical user session (i.e. /etc/init.d/gdm restart), the audio works!
it only seems to be in 2-channel stereo though, but i'm not sure if that's just me needing to find the right modprobe option foo to snd-hda-intel.