After trying many tutorials scattered around the web with no luck, the problem was discussed at one of our regular SOSLUG meetings, and found that the Dell Inspirion 1521 shares a similar audio chipset that requires the Intel HD driver to function. The following is taken from the Dell 1521 page.
You need to blacklist the "snd-hda-intel" kernel module from being loaded automatically by appending it to /etc/hotplug/blacklist Reboot.