New sound difficulty

[MR ZenWiz]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 6:04 PM, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just upgraded my main desktop hardware to a Gen4 i7 with an ASRock
> Z97 Pro4 m/b (and a heftier power supply).
>
> From the first boot, I can't use the analog audio (speaker output on
> the back of the m/b).  I comes out slow, repeating and muffled with
> static.
>
> If I use the HDMI monitor headphone jack, it's fine.
>
> I have Alsa installed and I thought I had PulseAudio defeated, but it
> seems to be running anyway.  I don't believe that's the problem, but
> the on-board sound is unusable as is.
>
> Any suggestions for what it might be?  It's really annoying not to be
> able to use the sound output on the m/b - one of the reasons I
> upgraded.
>

Now after I rebooted to turn pulseaudio back on (lost all controls
when it was uinstalled), not only does the sound not work properly but
I'm not getting the automount of my flash drives when I plug them in.

This happened once before, but I think I just rebooted again and they worked.

If I run Thunar and select the drive, *then* it mounts, but that's not
what it should be doing.

Are there any known issues with the ASRock Z97 Pro4 mobo?  Might it be
something else?  I can still take that mobo back and get another one,
but if I do, which is a good one for Intel 1150 sockets?

I looked at the alsactl output and I don't know enough details to know
what to look for that might shed light on this.

Everything else seems to work fine, but what's going to fail next?