I'm also thinking of tossing pusleaudio away after 1 day using it and return to ALSA, as it really uses a lot of CPU power.
The Problem is, that I won't have multiple sound sources working any more then.
Although I had correctly set up dmix (at least I think I did), I couldn't get different sound sources to play correctly.
For example when I used Qmmp (a really great audio player you need to check this out!^^) I couldn't get any sound out of any other applications that used phonon (KDE notifications for example). Qmmp + sound from flash was working though, that's why I think dmix worked correctly.

Listening Amarok 1.4 via xine engine, system settings are ON with xine phonon-backend, 64bit Flash with Firefox.
And I can have all of them playing simultaneously with low CPU consumption

Using OSS v4.1 in kubuntu 8.10

about OSS:
I already tried this one and I really liked it (thanks to vmix and stuff), but the problem is that it doesn't automatically detect, when I plug in my headphones.

Automatic jack sensing currently doesn't work properly with some HDAudio-powered motherboards. This means that, depending on your motherboard model, you may have to manually switch off your speakers when plugging your earphone.

found on archlinux wiki

Unfortunately I am "suffering" from this bug.

I'll check out the current status of this, because the last time I used OSS was 4 months ago.

edit: I forgot about another problem I had with OSS: KMix didn't support OSS 4 months ago. Did this change?

thanks
pano