Help! I’ve Installed Kubuntu on my Notebook and the Sound Doesn’t Work!

I just (well, a few weeks ago) installed an instance of Kubuntu on a Dell Studio 17 (the host OS is Vista Home Premium 64-bit) and the volume went from low, after the initial installation, to non-existent after rebooting. Was it possible that the volume on Amarok was down? Nope, it was at 100%. Was the volume setting located in the task bar set to mute? No again. Was the Mixer at fault? No.

After trolling the web and finding many possible reasons for the sudden onset of muteness (bad drivers, conflicting installations of software) I found a simple check that proved to be the most telling: I ran the command line alsamixer and made sure the volume is up!

This is what I saw after I opened a Konsole terminal window and typed alsamixer:

Notice the lack of color on the third bar; the one labelled PCM. After moving the cursor to the PCM column and pressing the up arrow a few dozen times the bar was nicely multi-colored. This is what the alsamixer levels looked like (notice the PCM is up) after my tinkering:

I pressed Esc to exit alsamixer and ran the following to save the settings:

sudo alsactl store

The cat was alive.