[LAU] Internal speaker set as default playback, not my usb soundcard.

Hello all, Recently did an upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 from 12.04. All went well except I've encountered a very weird problem. My usb audio is no longer the default sound card. I had to some some trickery (made snd-usb-audio=-1 and snd-hda-intel=-2) in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf to get the usb card as #0 as listed by /proc/asound/cards and then I got all sound going out through my usb card. Fun fun fun. Now with Ubuntu 14.04, my usb card is still listed as #0 in asound/cards, but mplayer defaults to my internal speakers when issued 'mplayer sound.wav'. Also tried: mplayer -Dalsa=hw=0.0 sound.wav Plays through my usb soundcard mplayer -Dalsa=hw=1.0 sound.wav Plays through my internal speakers mplayer -Dalsa=plughw sound.wav Plays through my usb soundcard mplayer -Dalsa=default sound.wav Plays through my internal speakers. Also I tried opening 'pavucontrol' fwiw and disabling the internal speaker. Playing a sound file without any other options via mplayer sends the sound through my usb soundcard. This is really strange and perhaps I'm not entirely understanding all the "wonderfulness" that is alsa. Cheers, Andrew.