I wouldn't think that /etc/profile would be a great place for it; then I think alsactl will want to restore every time I login on a new tty. Seems to me before when I had alsa that there was a debian script somewhere that determined whether those settings would be done or not, but there was a discrepancy; somewhere alsa was called alsasound or vice versa, so I always had to edit that script everytime there was an upgrade. But I don't remember where it was.
