I've had the xine back end for phonon since I started using KDE4, and I disabled the on board sound right after installing the new card back in the 10.3 days. Anyway, as I mentioned before, after installing pulse and tweaking a few files (files posted in my last post) the sound system has been plying through multiple apps without any issue.
My phonon layout stuff is really confusing, multiple cards display for what is in fact only one card.
See Here.
However, that isn't what bothers me - phonon works, I don't get that message any more. The issue that I really want to fix, is that I do not have a master volume control, of which
I would really like to figure out how to have.
See Here.
It's the same in alsamixer as well.
Clicky.
As you can see, I have volume controls for each individual speaker, but I do not have a single control that turns them down all together. That is all I really need now.