No audio being output after unmerging pulseaudio with ALSA

[osilkin98]

I recently installed KDE yesterday and had configured my kernel to be compliant with ALSA. After the KDE installation completed, however, I noticed that the hardware buttons on my ThinkPad T420 (volume up, down, mute) weren't actually performing the actions that they were meant for.

They are getting registered by Gentoo if I press them, however they aren't actually mapped to their correct actionscripts. The sound DID work, however it was I think halfway up as alsamixer would've had it (I hadn't checked it until later). I tried using speaker-test and it gave output from both the left and the right speaker correctly, just quietly. Since the buttons didn't work properly I decided to look for a fix and ended up stupidly installing pulseaudio, with hopes that it would somehow remedy my issue.

When I emerged pulseaudio, it prompted the installation of an additional 7 packages whose names I cannot recall, along with pulseaudio. (8 in total)

After everything finished and I rebooted the system, the volume buttons DID function the way they were supposed to, and the mute button lit up when pressed, so that was a good sign. However, no audio was actually playing. When I went into alsamixer, it said that both the card and the device were pulseaudio. I tried using speaker-test again to test, but strangely, now there was only one side whenever the audio would be tested. Just the front left, and it wouldn't make any noise as previously mentioned.

I then realized that I had made a mistake and decided to unmerge pulseaudio, however it only unmerged pulseaudio itself, and not the remaining 7 packages that came along with it when I installed it. I tried playing around with ALSA a bit more, but no luck.

Now that pulseaudio is gone, however, if I go into alsamixer it'll tell me my proper card infromation to be

[bunder]

ah good ole hda-intel... do you have the correct codec installed (I'm guessing conexant)?

I can't imagine installing pulseaudio would break something... Have you tried deleting the asound.conf completely? AFAIK you shouldn't need it.
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[osilkin98]