Fixed my sound issues in Ubuntu

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After installing Ubuntu on this PC, I found I had no sound. None at all. I quickly searched the internet and found that Ubuntu 14.04 was infamous for sound problems. I tried a lot of suggested solutions. I did a force reload of alsa. I purged pulse-audio and reinstalled it. I checked to make sure it was reading my sound card (it was) and that it wasn't set to HDMI as default (it wasn't). Nothing worked. But for 24 hours a thought kept nagging at me. I kept pushing it away. "Ridiculous," I muttered. "That couldn't be it. But, still... maybe?" You see, before I switched out this tower with The Man, giving him the working Windows 7 computer, he had expressed a sincere dislike of the volume of the speakers and turned the sound volume all the way down on the Windows desktop. Not on the speakers, on Windows. Then we switched out the towers and those speakers were not attached to that PC anymore, they were attached to this one with the Linux on it. And I was controlling them with the Linux settings. Wasn't I? It seems impossible, but just for the heck of it, I switched out the speakers and guess what? His speakers (the same brand and model as mine) worked fine with Ubuntu. So I hooked my speakers up to his machine, and had him turn the volume setting on Windows all the way up. Then I put the speakers back on the Linux machine. And they work. It doesn't make sense to me. The speakers have individual controls on the speaker front. And I don't know how Microsoft managed to take control of them and mute them even when they were hooked up to another sound system entirely. But, it goes to show that sometimes you have to try the solution that seems simple and ridiculously impossible. Sometimes it's just a matter of turning the right switch. Oh, and never underestimate the evil of Microsoft. They do plan on taking over the world - once everyone is running Windows 10, that is. And when Windows tells your speakers to be quiet, they stay quiet. Forever.