Well, I wanted to record for posterity this fix I just did to my Linux install. Hopefully Google will pick it up soon in case others have this issue.
I just installed my Audiophile 2496 soundcard, which sounds much better than the old soundblaster I was running. When I installed it and rebooted, ALSA(Advanced Linux Sound Architecture…the Linux sound system) loaded the correct driver, ice1712, automatically. XMMS had no difficulty with it, and it played back mp3s, oggs, and CDs fine. It was a nice relief to hear good quality audio again.
However, when I went to play back a DVD using Xine, the audio was lower-pitched than normal. This is the problem I want to document.
The problem is a sampling rate problem. When audio expects 44.1kHz, and gets 48kHz, the pitch of the resulting audio is affected. The solution is to go to the config file, /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf, and change every ‘48000’ parameter to ‘44100’. There were 2 instances of this in my config file. Once I changed it, I restarted Xine, and everything worked great.