/var/log/kern.log talking about the snd-hda-intel driver "failing to set MSI" whatever that is.
I found that there were two issues, the snd-hda-intel driver was not detecting the correct model and was improperly trying to enable msi. I fixed it by adding the follwing to
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf :
options snd-hda-intel model=asus enable_msi=0If you have a different chip model, you can find yours out at: http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt. Good luck.