No audio most of the time, but system acts as if there is

[virduun]

For about the last month or so (been running this system for almost a year now) I've run into an issue where there will be no audio on about 60-90% of boots, but there are no errors concerning audio, and trying to play back anything results in everything running as if there was audio. Alsamixer reports everything fine and seems to see and use the sound card, restarting alsasound does nothing, and the only apparent solution is to keep rebooting until it happens to actually have audio (and yes, the speakers are turned on--I use them to try gauging the probability of audio actually working by the number of pops they make during boot--3 seems to be the magic number, though there may have been times it worked with only 2 pops, but who knows if it's even related). After I updated my system today, including kernel 3.3.3, I must have gone through about 10 consecutive boots without audio working, so I decided to finally bite the bullet and ask on here. Anybody have an idea what's going on?

According to the manual for my motherboard, the sound card is a VIA VT1708S.

Edit:
Potentially unusual development. About 4 times now, I've rebooted and after verifying that there was no audio, I partially unplugged the speakers and plugged them back in, and every time, audio has worked afterwards. Is it just not automatically noticing that there are speakers plugged in or something?

[whig]

Do you have more than one audio device? Which one gets to be device 0? Check:

[virduun]

Results of "aplay -l"

[VoidMage]

Does a trivial test of:

[PaulBredbury]

Check which previous kernel works.

Use the kernel bugzilla.

[virduun]