PulseAudio gets pushed as a mandatory component of the audio stack. Alas,
it too often fails to work on systems where plain ALSA works perfectly.
In the past, Pulse had the advantage of software mixing, but ALSA can do that for over a decade.
Here's an example of PA corrupting sound:
The song was played via Clementine, although other players I tried (mplayer,
...) also exhibit the same problem. The output was then sent over a 3.5mm
jack to 3.5mm jack cable to another computer and recorded. Recording was
done pretty inadequately — without even good volume control (ALSA version
in particular was recorded too loud, leading to some noise), sorry for that.
The problem with Pulse is still clearly audible.
In this particular case (my desktop), I found a workaround: instead of
the perfectly working (with ALSA) sound card, I bought an €1 USB dongle;
it lets me use Pulse-requiring programs without flaky emulation such
as apulse. That's not a real option on a laptop or phone, though.
Other cases on my personal machines:
- failure after suspend+resume requiring manual restart of PulseAudio; upstream response "your sound card doesn't support suspend". This happens even if no sound was being played at suspend time; ALSA works perfectly even if suspended during playback.
- kernel crash on an armhf laptop that requires a vendor kernel (Omega OAN133). This is arguably not a fault of Pulse itself — but the result is the same: can't use Pulse, ALSA works perfectly.