usb-audio anyone?

[Katie Durden]

So I just bought a plantronics usb headset, i love it, except for the
fact that i can't get it working under linux...

well i guess it is sort of working, i plug it in and the snd-usb-audio
module is loaded, and if i explicitly use it, such as
aplay -D hw:1,0 <file.wav>
it will play via the headset. I should say i have had no luck getting
it set as default, but that's not quite right either.
using the in-kernel drivers, if i booted the system with headset
plugged in, it would end up as default, and work, except that
apparently the chip is single channel so alsa is using software
mixing, and speech doesn't quite shut up before the next line starts
talking. for example, its reading a line of text, i hit numpad seven
to move up, it starts reading the prior line but doesn't interrupt the
text that was previously being spoken for about a half second...so
that's no good.

updated to the latest alsa, outside the kernel, and now i can't get
speech at all if i manage to get usb-audio as default. I can play
music just fine as default, but if I do spd-say, using the ibmtts
module i get something about default being an invalid device.

So, has anyone had any success getting this working? i'm starting to
go slightly insane trying to figure this out.

thanks

Katie D