pulseaudio command line control?

[Tom Horsley]

By running "gnome-control-center sound" I can get a GUI app
in which I can set a device profile to "off" so that pulse
will stop fooling with it, and I am then free to talk to
it directly with alsa to do special things like ac3
passthrough to spdif.

My question is: Can I do the same thing with a command
line tool so I can modify the pulse settings in scripts
and set them back to normal after (for instance) playing
a DVD?