[SOLVED]Audio issue (esp with S/PDIF)

[MediaMonkey]

(I posted it in Installation Issues forum as part of another post. But I think it fits better here.)

My Core/MD hybrid setup was working just fine with S/PDIF through my receiver for last few days. All of a sudden it started making only severely distorted sound .. sounds like extremely over saturated input signal (scratchy, metallic). I tried even with another hard disk with a previous trial installation of LinuxMCE with the same result. In fact The problem happens in all the outputs. SPDIF, coax as well as analog. Sound is integrated in the motherboard which is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186104&Tpk=N570SM2AA-8EKRS2H. .

It is very disturbing as I was pretty close to finalize my LMCE core -- even my HDHomeRun is on the way. It is intriguing since the exact same hardware setup works fine with Windows XP ME.

Thanks for any help...

I fixed it:  I tried to enable and disable SPDIF in ALSA using alsamixer as described in http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Dolby_Digital_Out_(AC3,_SPDIF)

SPDIF in my core motherboard works with LinuxMint when IEC958 is enabled whereas it works in LinuxMCE when it is disabled!