please help with alsa problem under slackware 7.1

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi All,
I've just installed alsa drivers 0.5.11, lib 0.5.10b, and utils 0.5.10 on a machine.
I went through the various install steps with no problems/errors.
I successfully modprobed for my card, and the module loaded fine.
Remembering something in the docs about all the channels being mutted, 
I ran alsamixer. It correctly detected my card. However, since it seems to be somewhat graphical in nature, I didn't know how to proceed.
So, I did ctrl+c, and got out of it.
Then just to see if anything would happen, I tried to play a wave file.
I got an error from sox saying that device /dev/dsp could not be found. 
I then ran ls in /dev, and the nodes for dsp, dsp0-dsp2 exist. What am I missing?
Yes, I ran the snddevices  script, and it ran just fine.
Thanks for any help in advance.
Greg