[LAU] ALSA alphanumeric with subdevices?

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.