I had same problem on old builds of 5.7 . I reinstalled and it works... You are checking others audio sources? Maybe your wav are corrupted, try some flac and run flac123 from packages. Your output is 0db? Set it using "outputs.master=255,255" on /etc/mixerctl.conf The faq have a section about this, your tried? http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq13.html#audioprob
Also your report: >After the 'aucat' invocation the system appears to be in a different state: >$ cat /dev/audio0 >/tmp/foo # Different error message: >cat: /dev/audio0: Device busy >$ cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio # No noise this time. >-bash: /dev/audio: Device busy Seems the process keep running, you kill it before these commands?