My experience with pulseaudio on Arch has been quite a bit better. It's most likely due to the audio systems handling each sound card differently, which is indeed a mess. My problem is that especially with Alsa, my system seems to be muted rather than a sane volume being set. This doesn't appear to be a problem with my onboard device, since the talking installer came up right away, albeit at a rather low volume. It always happens, however, on my Soundblaster Live Value, which always starts muted, even when sane volumes are supposed to be set, such as in Vinux and Ubuntu. ~Kyle
