What distro are you using? I'm on Slackware x64, and ASound, OpenAL, and ALSA all run fine. When you say the audio is terrible, do you mean it's distorted and scratchy, or something like that?
One possibility is that one of the volume settings has been set to mute. I've not used PulseAudio, but I've read that its mixer might have trouble detecting whether or not ALSA's own mixer is set to mute. I think if you run the command "alsamixer" you should be able to see if anything is muted at all, in which case you can reset the volumes.
One possibility is that one of the volume settings has been set to mute. I've not used PulseAudio, but I've read that its mixer might have trouble detecting whether or not ALSA's own mixer is set to mute. I think if you run the command "alsamixer" you should be able to see if anything is muted at all, in which case you can reset the volumes.