@mitu
I think I must have hit the audio settings script module several times. with a healthy amount of reboots before it did anything in the way of successfully setting up ALSA
I'm still lost on this one. I know a clean install after installing retropie it did have audio, somewhere i lost audio updating and configuring pretty early on. I gave up on it several months back only to come back to it today.
I'm starting to lean towards it being some issue with argon one HDMI daughter board. But in the end it is working now, and i admit it is very unlikely that my "fix" did anything.
I just remembered I installed Kodi, from optional packages, somewhere in this attempt too. I feel really dumb, but at least there is always something to learn