To pulse or not to pulse?

[Brad Alexander <storm16@gmail.com>]

I need an opinion here. I had a 5 year old, lovingly upgraded
workstation with 32-bit sid up until I upgraded my hardware. I did a
nuke and pave and reinstalled amd64 sid.

Sometime along the line, pulseaudio was installed, which broke sound
on the old setup. Through my reading, it appeared that pulse behaved
better when installed with a clean install. (the old one was about 5
years old.)

So I tried to like pulse, tried to get along with it, but I'm having a
really hard time with it. I am running sid with kde 4.x, and, to give
one example (there are several I have noticed), when playing music
with Amarok, every time a screen issue happens (e.g. when the screen
saver kicks in, or when the track changes and Amarok kicks up a dialog
with the name/artist of the next track, the sound goes wonky and
sounds like it is underwater. Sometimes this will clear up on its own
after a few minutes, but other times it doesn't or I want it fixed
immediately...Then I can slide the master volume down and back up in
kmix (sometimes it takes twice). Very frustrating.

Now, I did a little research a couple of weeks ago, and found on the
Ubuntu wiki (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/) that they recommend
installing several extra pulse-related packages. Is it worth it? Will
it fix my problems? Or is it not worth the effort and should I just
nuke pulse from orbit? (It's the only way to be sure...)

Opinions and experiences requested and welcome.

Thanks,
--b