On Wed, Mar 08, 2017 at 10:47:00PM +0100, Alessandro Selli wrote:
> I'm going to look for technical reasons because PA should not be made
> the only sound backend in Linux. I remember when PA was new my reaction
> was negative because it was behaving badly (made sound worse), it kept
> spawning a demon that just would never go away no matter what I did
> (even as root) and made alsamixer lose all but one of it's controls.
> But mostly I wondered why did Linux need two sound layers (PA and the
> kernel Alsa modules) to do audio.

For me on the machine I sit my butt in front of:
* PA, after suspend+resume, makes sound really high-pitched and choppy;
my uneducated guess is that it tries to play a fraction-of-second buffer
at a higher frequency, leaving silence for the rest of the time slice.
This is merely a wild guess based on what I hear, I haven't recorded it
to properly analyze. "killall pulseaudio" helps, it immediately respawns
like a cockroach it is, until next suspend.

Upstream's response to bug report: "your sound card doesn't support
suspend". Except that the problem happens with PA even when suspending
when no sound is being played, while bare ALSA works fine even if the
suspend happened with an on-going sound. And it's ALSA that talks
directly to the hardware.

* PA produces a quiet noise, so quiet that it's audible only when no sound
is played and the house is silent -- but audible enough to be infuriating

I for one don't care about other problems:
* it wastes 7% of a core -- it's a desktop so wakeups don't eat my battery
and the electricity cost is not worth the time it'd take to fix this
* nasty latency -- I hardly ever play games
* audiophile issues


I for one don't watch any [net] TV, not even YouTube, but everyone I know
who does, they don't use a separate TV anymore but watch everything in the
browser. Thus Firefox being PA only sounds like a major problem.

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