esdplay sound problem on FC4

[Anand Buddhdev]

Good {morning,afternoon,evening},

I installed FC4 on my computer a few days ago. Previously, the computer 
had FC3 on it, and sound worked perfectly. Now I have a strange problem 
with FC4. It's a clean FC4 installation with some FreshRPMs packages.

If I play an MP3 file with totem or RealPlayer, it plays fine. If I play 
a WAV file with the command-line "play" command, it also works fine.

However, I noticed that if I run a game like Frozen Bubble, or Supertux, 
then the sound is distorted. I also have my thunderbird configured to 
play a WAV file when new email comes in, and whenever thunderbird plays 
this file, the sound is distorted, exactly like it is with the games.

I tried a couple of things, I noticed that if I run:

play /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav

it plays fine. If instead I run:

esdplay /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav

the sound is distorted.

Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong here and how I could fix 
it? What's the difference between "play" and "esdplay", and why might 
esdplay be producing distorted sounds?

Anand