I seem to have gotten pulseaudio working without any problems. I just installed pulseaudio and changed /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to get rid of the distortion. Here's the values I changed, which I read on the Arch forum somewhere: default-sample-method=src-sinc-best-quality And you'll need to uncomment this one: default-fragments = 5 The original value was 4, but the post said to change it to 5, and I'm having no trouble with it at this point. I see no reason now to still be paranoid about installing pulseaudio. It's becoming the default in more and more distros, and it's good to report any bugs that come up. That being said, this is the reason why I have come to love Arch. It has no default system, so it's possible to make choices based on personal preference rather than having choices made by distro X that may not fit individual needs.
