Hi William.  All my sound card channels were still muted when I started 
Alsamixer.  In case it's relevant, the LSPCI utility describes my sound 
card as follows:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High 
Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)

Alsamixer reports that my soundcard is of type HDA Intel and that the 
audio chip itself is a Realtek ALC883.  If you need any clarification or 
further details, please let me know.  I would very much appreciate any 
further suggestions or advice you may have.

Yours sincerely,

John Robinson





On 09/10/09 22:22, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 09:55:01PM +0100, John Robinson wrote:
>    
>> Hi William and many thanks for your message.  I tried exactly what you
>> suggested, booting into the live DVD and typing 'gentoo
>> speakup.synth=dectlk nox' at the boot prompt.  My Dectalk USB started
>> speaking as it should, but after all Alsa modules were loaded, it
>> announced that no Alsa configuration was present and that I'd have to
>> unmute my card.  Sorry I couldn't record the exact message.  I then
>> launched Alsamixer, unmuting all channels and turning them up to full
>> volume.  After pressing 'Escape' to save the settings, I played an MP3
>> file with Mplayer to ensure that my card was unmuted.  This file played
>> successfully.  I next typed 'espeak "Hello,this is a test."' as you
>> suggested.  There was no error, but I heard no speech at all.  Finally,
>> I repeated the same procedure, but output the result to a Wave file.  I
>> played this successfully in Mplayer.
>>
>> In conclusion, Espeak appears to be able to creat Wave files on my
>> system, but does not appear to be able to speak through Alsa, even when
>> all my sound card's channels are unmuted.  I would very much appreciate
>> any advice you may have as to how to resolve this.
>>      
>
>   Ok John, we found this issue, and we are working on building another
>   image that will allow espeak to speak through alsa.
>
> The other thing I am concerned about though is your sound card.  When
> you started alsamixer was everything still muted?
>
> William
>
>