[23:06] <spectacular> well, Eickmeyer, you'll never guess... but today, I've lost my sound again. just out of the blue. has been working perfectly since we last talked.
[23:07] <Eickmeyer> Oh noooo
[23:08] <spectacular> i'm going to see about just exchanging the computer tomorrow, warrantee should still be good, hopefully they won't give me a hard time. just a pain in the neck to have to transfer all my files and reinstall everything
[23:08] <spectacular> but since it's gotta be a hardware thing I can't just let this go
[23:08] <spectacular> so weird
[23:09] <Eickmeyer> Yeah. It definitely smells like a hardware problem. I'm so sorry to hear this. Erratic behavior almost always points to hardware.
[23:11] <spectacular> my only other guess as to what may have sparked the problem last time and this time, is -- the last time, I noticed the error some time after the computer died suddenly because I was using it on battery power without a power cable nearby, and it didn't warn me it was about to loose power.  So it just died.  And this time, perhaps a similar thing happened - a game (Wingspan, on Steam) caused the computer to freeze 
[23:11] <spectacular> (very weird that that happened btw) and the only way to get out of it was a hard shutdown pressing and holding the power.  Later, I'm without sound again.  Is there some process, related to audio, that the computer needs to properly shut down and reset, and if it dies unexpectedly it has a hard time getting audio back? I can't think of what that may be. I've since shut down and restarted quite a number of times trying 
[23:11] <spectacular> to get it back but with no success
[23:13] <Eickmeyer> No, there's nothing special about audio that it needs to be shut-down by a process. I've done hard shutdowns multiple times on different audio hardware using the same software and there's no issues. Your hardware has got something wrong, likely a cold solder connection on the mainboard somewhere.
[23:13] <spectacular> thanks
[23:15] <Eickmeyer> spectacular: Quite welcome, and sorry about the bad news.
[23:16] <Eickmeyer> cjdg_: Your other connection is still having difficulty.