I often listen to music and watch movies using either headphones or wireless usb audio. Phonon does a great job of selecting the usb audio when it is available and otherwise falling back to hda intel, but I cannot seem to bind a keyboard shortcut to "preferred audio device", instead it has to be bound specifically to hda intel or usb audio device.

I'm going to try a workaround -- meta+mute for usb and mute for hda intel... but that seems like and ugly hack.

Thanks in advance!

Your workaround seems like the best solution in this case.

If you wish to have a feature like this in the future, I would recommend filing a feature request on the KDE bug tracker This kind of behaviour however should not be a default, because it might lead to unexpected behaviour to a user who is unaware of it.