Sound works but no device shown in the Sound settings

Ubuntu Unity 14.04 - 64bit, Intel mobo and i7 processor. After switching sound cards, I had [much better] sound but my sound output choices (System Settings : Sound) disappeared. I needed that to switch to S/PDIF output. After much monkeying around without success, including all of the above suggestions and more, nothing worked. For no particular reason, I logged into a 2nd user account, where I found the new output choices did indeed appear. I'd discovered that the settings were user-account specific. So, while I was there, I looked in .config and found a pulse directory. I copied that directory to the network, then switched back to the primary account. I found my .config/pulse directory (which had several additional files in it) and renamed it to pulse.orig in preparation to copy/paste the 2nd account's pulse directory from the network. But even as I switched directories to copy, then back to my .config directory, a new pulse directory had appeared, with the proper number of files in it. I checked System Settings / Sound, and my new sound devices were available for selection.

Long Story Short: Maybe find your [/home/userid]/.config/pulse directory and rename it (so a new default copy can appear).

Try these commands:

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base  
sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio  
sudo apt-get install alsa-base  
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio  
sudo alsa force-reload

In my case I had a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04, so reinstalling pulseaudio and alsa would be pointless.

However, running sudo alsa force-reload as in user91632's anwser did the trick.

Open the terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T and install pulseaudio with this command:

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indicator-sound