[fs2]

A few years back I ditched Pulseaudio for regular Alsa and it's been a godsend. No more crackling audio on bluetooth devices, alsamixer which can set all the volume levels and every program just works out of the box.

The problem I have with Pulseaudio is that it's fixing a problem that doesn't exist. It's great you can mix and match any channel you want with Pulseaudio but that's mostly a theoretical advantage. For desktop users Alsa with dmix offers everything you need, I can play audio, record and mix all at the same time. The few programs which absolutely require Pulse (I'm looking at you Firefox) can be fixed with apulse, which emulates Pulseaudio through Alsa.

[brokenmachine]

Me too. I was trying to get kodi working on an ubuntu machine with surround sound going over hdmi to my AVR. Basically I just wanted to create a working HTPC.

Pulseaudio could not achieve this.