espeakup and sound cards?

[David Csercsics]

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?