This is not the fault of your sound card. Leave the SB Live in if you feel you get better quality than you'd get with your onboard card. The problem is that pulseaudio pukes on anything which doesn't have a Master and PCM control. I can probably dig up a post or 12 from the pulseaudio developers stating that they only regularly test with cards using the snd-hda-intel module. Pulseaudio gets confused if it has to deal with something that doesn't follow the high definition audio standard. It doesn't let the user directly adjust the hardware volumes unless the user wants to do a lot of fiddling around with the alsa mixer controls before he starts pulseaudio for the first time. Have a look at your friendly search engine for pulseaudio on m-audio delta cards for example or pulseaudio on USB speakers. I gave up on pulseaudio after I tried it a while back and found distortion and a lot of clipping and most problematic was all the crashes. If someone would like to correct me for being wrong because I've not broke my system using a current pulseaudio setup then feel free. What I don't understand is how pulseaudio is supposed to interact with espeakup because that usually needs to be run as root? Pulseaudio doesn't like to run as root. When I tried it before I was informed that most of my crashes were caused by me running the daemon in system mode and I needed to be running pulseaudio as a regular user. So what do we do for sound at the login prompt?