The arecord error is meaningless since the alsa driver for the card failed to load. It may be the case that udev is loading driver modules in an order that is causing problems. It may be useful to try booting without udev. Also in a situation like this some manual loading of modules one by one might shed some light on the situation. lsmod will show loaded modules insmod will install a module rmmod will remove a module modprobe is another way to load a module You could try using rmmod to remove all audio related drivers then start loading them one by one watching for any error messages on load, something like modprobe snd modprobe soundcore modprobe snd-ens1371 modprobe snd-emu10k1 modprobe snd-mixer-oss modeprobe snd-seq-oss modprobe snd-pcm-oss Note there may be options on the modules for the card drivers (ensoniq and sblive) that can tweak their configuration on load, see the alsa pages for details. Also this may be useful http://alsa.opensrc.org/MultipleCards google alsa multiple sound cards will reveal tons of more info including others' dual sound card problems and solutions
