Well, if you have tried plughw (plug plugin), hw (hw plugin) and maybe dmix (dmix plugin) I think that's all you could try. I don't know that much about ALSA, but changing the devices in mpd.conf did the trick for me. I don't know Mopidy. But if it has something to do with mpd, try disabling "audio_...

Hi,
How are you playing those files? mpd? As far as I'm concerned, that metallic sound is usually the product of resampling or using the wrong(?) ALSA plugin.
For example, if I use mpd with plughw:0,0 I get distorted sound but hw:0,0 works great.

Weird thing with aplay -L. Maybe it is reading an old alsa configuration file?
If you have sound, probably it is a bad configured mpd.conf. Could you post it?
Also, what does 'ps aux (or is it ps w in raspbian?) | grep pulse' says?

Hi, As a very fast check I would apt-get purge pulseaudio*, reboot and then try again with mpd. It isn't enough with killing it because it is set to auto-spawn. If that works you could then continue to make pulseaudio set the DAC as the default card and/or use the pulse setting in mpd.conf If it doe...

@anyone running this version of XBMC Airplay doesn't seem to work? Am I the only one having this problem? Partially fixed it by installing AirPlay support outside XBMC but with XBMC running I get a lot of AirPlay distortion/crashes. Hope my new USB soundcard arrives this week. Cheers, Hi, Could you...

Hello, Although you can choose whether to keep or not Pulseaudio. This isn't really Pulseaudio's fault. The thing is when you have it installed, it becomes the default device. So if you want to change some soundcard control, you have to specify it with the -c argument like: amixer -c 0 cset numid=3 ...