Blast. Still no luck, even rebuilt the MD from scratch to ensure my fiddling with lirc etc hadn't affected anything. The only way I hear sound is when in KDE desktop and I test the multimedia settings.
So it is possible, obviously, to play the sound over HDMI but why not from LMCE, I wonder?
L3, can you point me in the right direction? I'm happy to dig through code and scripts and whatnot and test various things.