Installed VMWare Player to have a windows guess running on my linux host. I found the sound wasn't working well, sounding distorted and clipped.
Fixed this by:
a) Running 'aplay -L' and finding the entry for my soundcard beginning with "front". In my case the entry was "front:CARD=Intel,DEV=0".
b) Edit my vm config file "Windows Vista.vmx" and changing the following entries to:
sound.fileName = "front:CARD=Intel,DEV=0"
sound.autodetect = "FALSE"
Thanks to this post for the solution.