I think there must be something broken in KDE as far as sound devices so.

I have a Dell Optiplex 3010, the built-in soud card is listed by lspci as:

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00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

I have installed Debian 7, 64 bit and my KDE is 4.8.4, apparently. So far, so good - the speakers worked fine, out of the box, recording worked as soon as I unmuted the microphone in alsamixer. In Phonon, I could see the built-in playback and recording devices.

I then bought a webcam - according to lsusb:

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Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0603:8122 Novatek Microelectronics Corp.

This messed up everything - no sound from the speakers, no recording from the microphone. The webcam worked, but the I had to explicitly select the built-in sound card to get playback working, and recording is broken. When I plug the webcam in, I see it listed as a recording device, and the built-in sound card is grayed out; when I remove the webcam, both are grey. This persists even after reboot - without having the webcam plugged in.

How can I achieve the following:

- I want to be able to record sound from the sound card only; the microphone in the webcam should be completely disabled
- I do not want to see the webcam listed as a recording device in Phonon

I could of course do it the Windows way: reinstall from scratch, but I have come to expect better from Linux. Maybe I just need to find the right documentation, but where is it?

Does your system use Pulseaudio? Also, which Phonon backend is in use? (see System Settings > Multimedia > Phonon > Backends).

With regards to preventing the webcam microphone from being listed - I doubt this is possible, unless you can convince ALSA to not be aware of it via blacklisting or similar operations.