I want to bump this because I am having a very similar problem. However, it showed up once I switched my DE from MATE to Cinnamon. My audio was working just fine beforehand, and it has stopped working now. I have added pulseaudio as a service, and my problem is the same, as if there is no audio device connected.

On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 5:42:13 AM UTC-8, tuxracer wrote:

So, I installed alsa and pulseaudio and alsa plugin then made simlink /etc/sv/alsa to /var/service and /etc/sv/pulseaudio to /var/service as well but system is not detecting any soundcard. alxamixer returns blank and nothing to configure. What went wrong?