Bear in mind that I'm now deaf or nearly so in one ear...so go easy on me or I just won't hear you.":O}
I'm all for progress and improvement but...
What's wrong with Pulseaudio and Alsa?

Pulseaudio and Alsa have not played well for a long time. They "do" work together, but I've had my share of issues with games and Wine. As far as I know, Alsa is just really old and needs something newer just like OpenGL.

I remember when I first started testing games, Wine did not support Pulseaudio, so I had to modify configs for certain games to work.

I've also read that multi-track recording applications should use JACK instead of Pulseaudio.

Alsa has always worked well, but it doesn't have its own GUI like Pulseaudio. You can use alsamixer, but its very limited with multiple applications running at the same time. Pulseaudio is better, but you still need to install pavucontrols to really tweak it.

Its just another one of "those things" where you wish there was something better than settling with what we already have. The question is... will other Distro's adapt it?

Thanks Boo, now that you've explained it to me, Where do I sign up! ":O}

I'm no expert on the matter and was hoping Daerandin, Gizmo or one of the other guys would shed some light...

There's till hope they might! ":O}

YAAS (Yet Another Audio System)

Anything that aims to gain a foothold in linux-land has to AT LEAST replace the functionality of Asla in a transparent way, or else work with Alsa. There's just too much out there written to work with it.

That being said, the idea of have a single system to handle both audio and video streams has merit. One of the problems with having separate systems is latency, and keeping the two streams in sync with each other.

For most applications, it's not so much the latency of getting through the system as it is that the latency be CONSISTENT and PREDICTABLE. Even Windows suffers from this to a certain extent with DirectX (or at least it did with DX6, which is the last version I coded on; yes, I know DX6 is OLD so that comment may not be relevant any longer).

As long as MS sucks this hard...you can say anything you like about them, if your criticism is unfounded today, MS will bring it to life tomorrow! ":O}