Hello Flemur and thanks for your assistance. After reading my post I expected a "Trying to solve X by doing Y" come back. So it's nice to see someone else in the same kind of situation. I did try and follow advice on saving alsamixer settings but none worked for me and when I found amixer hoped I could use that.
I tested redirecting output to a file and the file wasn't created.
So I took your example and put my line in a script I called soundset and placed in /usr/sbin. I was avoiding this as I was working to the KISS principle. But I tested just the script. I closed all windows and then killed X to force a soft restart as I found this tended to reset sound settings.
Logged back in and then I heard a startup sound! Hooray.
The command worked without quotes in the terminal so I expected they wasn't needed and no labels had spaces.
Thanks again.