clipping or static in audio with nforce2 / ALSA drivers

[capybara]

I'm trying to get kernel 2.6.1-mm2 with the ALSA 1.0.1 drivers to work with my nforce2 board, a Shuttle AN35N. After following all of the instructions I could find on the web, I got the sound marginally working, but I have a problem: the sound becomes painfully clipped during louder passages, as if something on the board is being overdriven. Has anyone else had this problem or heard of anything like it? If you have any ideas about how to debug it, please let me know - I'll be happy to do experiments and post any information that might be useful.

[rsnic]

Have an nforce 1, i also got that crackling sound but only in xine. In .asoundrc I had to set the period size to 512 which made it magically disappear.
Check out this, although for fedora it is a good guide and shows how to set up apps to use it.
http://fedoranews.org/contributors/andre_costa/alsa/