This reminds me your note:
https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-July/004519.htm
l
PA does not make use of hardware mixing. And I don't plan to change
that. It's obsolete technology. CPUs these days come with extensions
such as MMX or SSE precisely for speeding up DSP tasks such as PCM
mixing. This is way more flexible that hw mixing, and definitely the
way to the future, both on the desktop and on embedded envs as well.
The "obsolete technology" -- who made this decision? Is it your private
opinion or any suggestion from sound card manufacturers?
It seems that HW companies still produce the "obsolete technology".
First, I like pulseaudio, especially the ability of moving streams from one
sink to another is awesome for laptops with external sound card :o)
But imo hw mixer (or other hw parts) are not that bad... we still have hw
accelerated graphic, math,... why not sound? Also this remains me that
pulseaudio eats 24 % of my (1.6GHz) cpu when mapping stereo stream to 5.1
which (I suppose) some hw mixer could do while letting cpu free for other
tasks.