Comment 1 for bug 108577

I have run an strace
strace -o log esdplay /usr/share/sounds/login.wav
and it shows that esdplay looks for the socket in /tmp/.esd-1000 and of course can not find it
access("/tmp/.esd-1000/socket", R_OK|W_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

and indeed
ermanno@ubuntu:~$ cd /tmp
ermanno@ubuntu:/tmp$ ln -s .esd .esd-1000
esdplay /usr/share/sounds/login.wav

works like a charm