ASRock ION 330HT, HDMI sound and newer linux distros

Dear all,

I have an ASRock Ion 330HT as my HTPC, had it for quite a while. Originally it was installed with Ubuntu 10.04, and it took me quite a bit of effort to get HDMI sound (channel mappings) working properly with that. Later I upgraded (ubuntu dist/release upgrade) to 12.04, and miraculously my HDMI sound kept working properly. A while back I had a crash of XBMC, and after that my HDMI sound was screwed up again and this time I can't get it working properly anymore no matter what I do. I can't for the life of me figure out how an XBMC crash could have any impact on that, but there you go.

I'm considering a complete re-install of this PC with Linux Mint 13 (or possibly wait for 14). But I'm wondering what's going to happen with my HDMI sound then. Do newer Linux distributions "get this right" out of the box, or can I expect to have to spend significant effort again trying to get the HDMI channel mapping right? Does anybody have any experiences with this specific box and fresh Mint 13 / Ubuntu 12.04 installs?

Rgds, Maarten