valshak.com

It would appear that a resent update to Nvidia's drivers has allowed for audio to be transmitted via the HDMI (or DVI) port. This would seem all well-and-good except that, for whatever reason, in my situation it totally disabled audio being transfered via an analog signal (ie. the way PC speakers are hooked up to your computer). This caused quiet a problem for me because I had not delved into getting my audio over an HDMI cable so I had no idea the issue was coming. But, anyways, here's what I've recently done to get it working.

1. Make sure you're using ALSA v1.0.19 (that means alsa-driver, alsa-utils and alsa-lib should all be the same version)
2. Edit your /etc/pacman.conf so that you have NoUpgrade = lib/modules/2.6.28-ARCH/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-intel.ko under the [options] heading.
3. Create a file in your home folder called .asoundrc and put pcm.!default hdmi in it.

What this process does is first rebuilds the sound driver to have audio over HDMI support, then telling pacman not to alter your sound driver when it does an update. Finally the .asoundrc file tells ALSA to default to using HDMI as the sound output for the system.

NOTE:: My system uses the snd-hda-intel sound driver, if your system does not use that driver you will need to change the italisized text in step 2 to the proper driver used by your system.