According to Rodrigo Rivas:
Have you tried running "alsamixer -D hw" and see if there are any muted channels in your hardware?
Master is at 87% normally. Once GDM runs, it zeros out and mutes. Also, once pulseaudio starts, the Master channel zeros out and mutes.
Also, once I had a similar problem and solved it by simply deleting the files at ~/.pulse/*.tdb
Unfortunately this is also not working. I even tried deleting the entire ~/.pulse directory with no luck. Thanks for the help.
~Kyle
