[arch-general] GDM and/or PulseAudio mute my sound

[Kyle]

According to Rodrigo Rivas:
> One last idea. Maybe the gnome-settings-daemon is playing dumb with your
> sound. I think you can disable the sound plugin of g-s-d using dconf
> (org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.sound.active).
>

I tried

dconf write org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/sound/active false

> I don't know if that will affect also to the GDM greeter, but it is worth
> trying it.
It had no effect, either in the greeter or in GNOME itself.

> As a last resort you could also try renaming
> "/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon-3.0/libsound.so" and see what happens.
>

Strangely, this also has no effect at all. Once GDM starts, the master 
volume is still zeroed out and muted. I say zeroed out and muted because 
I must run alsamixer, turn up the master volume and then unmute it in 
order to get the sound working again, although

sudo systemctl start alsa-restore

also does work, since the volume was previously saved using

sudo systemctl start alsa-store

while the volume was at the proper level. At this point, I am totally 
stumped. The computer I had that died used a SoundBlaster Live Value, 
and although the sound started out muted, restoring the alsa volumes 
always worked as expected. However, on this machine with the Intel 
onboard sound, nothing seems to keep the volumes from muting whenever 
GNOMe and GDM start.
~Kyle