Re: "pulse audio died a horrible death in the 4.4 kernel"
Actually that was OSS not PulseAudio, the latter of which has never actually been in the kernel (since it's not a hardware driver, it's a sound server that merely processes output from drivers), and the former has in fact been disabled by default for years.
Personally I just use ALSA with a simple asoundrc config that gives me access to the hardware DSP and equaliser, something I was never able to figure out with pulseaudio. If I can remember that far back, I'm pretty sure this was trivial to do with OSS too, before it jumped the shark by going proprietary and everyone abandoned it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
