From Music Player Daemon Community Wiki

Common hardware issues

[edit] Soundcard doesn't function after changing format options

Are you sure you need format options? These are generally for sound cards that don't support the frequency of the file you're trying to play. Generally this happens with poorly designed or rather cheap sound cards. For instance, I have a sound card that came on my motherboard. It only expects audio at CD quality. Nothing more, nothing less. CD quality has a frequency of 44100 at 16 bits. I would write the format line in mpd.conf as such:

audio_output {
       type            "alsa"
       format          "44100:16:2"
       options         "dev=hw:0,0"
}

This will downsample or upsample the sound coming out of MPD at CD Quality. Even if upsampling this could cause distortion and is not recommended unless absolutely necessary. If you want to avoid this, get a sound card from a company that makes sound cards primarily, such as Turtle Beach or Creative.