[LAU] ALSA alphanumeric with subdevices?

[Jonathan E. Brickman]

I have my primary box nice and solid now, and it is working very well 
setting all ALSA output to hw:HD2, HD2 being the alphanumeric name of my 
sound card.  Today I installed Sabayon 5 on an old Toshiba laptop I keep 
around.  It is using today's conventional desktop 
everything-->ALSA/Pulse-->ALSA-->hardware setup, and it said audio was 
working AOK -- but no sound came out.  I checked the highest level, 
Pulse, and noticed that Pulse said there were two possible stereo audio 
outs, the default and one more.  I set it to the one more, and all is 
well for now.  There is no /etc/asound.conf, and there is no ~/.asoundrc.

The catch is, numeric ALSA device names appear to be in use, which means 
when I get the USB audio input for it, things will probably get 
juggled.  So, I want to convert this laptop to the nice and stable 
alphanumeric ALSA device names.  Both of the stereo audio outs of this 
laptop have the same alphanumeric name, one of them is listed as device 
1, the other as device 4.  They don't look like subdevices, but the only 
really solid reference data I have found is aplay -l and -L, and 
/proc/asound/cards, none of which are giving me data I can solidly 
depend on.  So:  Where is the best place to find this data, besides the 
qjackctl setup dialog (Jack won't be running on this laptop)?  How does 
one tell ALSA to choose between multiple alphanumeric devices of the 
same name?  And also, can one use alphanumeric device names with 
subdevice designations, a la hw:XYZ.1 ?

J.E.B.