Note that this is a stub and needs some substantial work to get actually usable

Troubleshooting

I don't hear any output from sound applications

Open a terminal and try playing a sound with paplay:

$ paplay /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav
$ 

In case you don't see any error message and hear the sound, your applications need to be configured to use PulseAudio. See the relevant section in PerfectSetup.

If you neither get an error message, nor hear the sound, check volume settings. For pulseaudio, use pavucontrol utlity. For ALSA use alsamixer -c 0.

$ paplay /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav
Connection failure: Connection refused
$ 

This most likely means that your pulseaudio server is not running.

Sound server is not running

Check that it is enabled to be started up in your desktop environment. See relevant sections of PerfectSetup for GNOME and KDE. Note that your OS distribution may already take care of this via dedicated packages.

Look into logs for reason why might pulseaudio startup have failed:

# grep pulseaudio /var/log/messages

Try to launch pulseaudio manually with verbose output enabled: (the output might be valuable to troubleshoot a potential bug)

$ pulseaudio -vvv

If your output seems like following, you might not have permissions to access the sound device:

D: alsa-util.c: Trying front:0...
ALSA lib conf.c:3949:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters 0
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM front:0
I: alsa-util.c: Couldn't open PCM device front:0: Invalid argument
D: alsa-util.c: Trying surround40:0...
ALSA lib conf.c:3949:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters 0
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM surround40:0
I: alsa-util.c: Couldn't open PCM device surround40:0: Invalid argument
D: alsa-util.c: Trying surround41:0...
ALSA lib conf.c:3949:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters 0
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM surround41:0
I: alsa-util.c: Couldn't open PCM device surround41:0: Invalid argument
D: alsa-util.c: Trying surround50:0...
ALSA lib conf.c:3949:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters 0
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM surround50:0
I: alsa-util.c: Couldn't open PCM device surround50:0: Invalid argument
D: alsa-util.c: Trying surround51:0...
ALSA lib conf.c:3949:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters 0
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM surround51:0
I: alsa-util.c: Couldn't open PCM device surround51:0: Invalid argument
D: alsa-util.c: Trying surround71:0...
ALSA lib conf.c:3949:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters 0
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM surround71:0
I: alsa-util.c: Couldn't open PCM device surround71:0: Invalid argument
D: alsa-util.c: Trying hw:0 as last resort...
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:1207:(_snd_pcm_hw_open) Invalid value for card
E: alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device hw:0: No such device
E: module.c: Failed to load  module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device_id=0 sink_name=alsa_output.pci_8086_284b_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0"): initialization failed.

Check the permission with getfacl /dev/snd/*.