Comment 2 for bug 723276

That's not exactly unimportant. The RME Hammerfall DSP contains a cross-bar configuration with lots of inputs and outputs. The crossbar is initialized to zeros by default (usual safety measure). When using the Hammerfall for sound output, one needs to open more than just the volume control for PCM output: one needs to route the output to some physical output via the crossbar as well.

The only user-available application for doing that is hdspmixer. Without hdspmixer, the soundcard is basically useless.

There is an obscure way for using alsactl for accessing crossbar elements write-only. But that is only accessible to scripts and the command line (or C programming).