[arokh]

Sadly this isn't working for me. I setup both an asound.conf in /etc and an .asoundrc in my home directory - no joy. Alsamixer only shows SPIDIF as my default (still) and the usual analog on the second card. Speaker test gives the output below. None of the GUI mixers show any outputs for some reason or fail to run. I suspect this is something silly, I'm still learning Linux - the hard way - and this isn't my first head banger with ALSA. Having trouble getting my shell script to execute on boot to fixup the remote too but that's far less critical and likely even more silly!

Well, there's your problem then. Alsamixer should show your PCM device, sounds like you don't have the correct modules loaded. They should be by default on any modern distro, not sure why that's not the case for you.

Trying this all on Mint but as I said before not wedded to it however I DO want a full desktop and dev environment loaded so OE isn't my first choice at this point.

Try the latest Mint version, or the latest Ubuntu should work fine as well. When it comes to Haswell support, you are better off with a bleeding edge distribution.