I'm not sure whether this will help, but I wanted to share my experience with Pulse Audio in Wheezy. When I first upgraded from Squeeze, I had pretty much no sound from Pulse Audio. I ran into many of the same things others described. Thankfully, I have a Braille display. With that, I was able to log into Gnome, and get into the volume controls. They can be accessed from the menu you get by pressing alt-control-tab. What I discovered was that Pulse was constantly setting my master volume to zero. I have no idea why. There is a control that just says "switch toggle button." I hit space on that control, and it changed to "switch toggle button pressed." I adjusted the master volume to an acceptable level, and Pulse has given me no trouble since. I have no idea what the control actually does, but it sure did something. I don't know how one would accomplish the same thing from the command line, but I figure there has to be a way. I still can't play sound as root, but I don't consider that much of a loss. I try to only use root for administrative tasks, so it's no big deal. I hope this at least gives some ideas to everybody fighting with Pulse Audio.
