Once upon a time, when I'd run "gnome-control-center sound" there would be a option to select profile "off" for some sound devices, which basically meant that pulseaudio would pretend it wasn't there, and I could use the alsa device directly in mplayer (for example).
Sometime in the past few weeks, this seems to have stopped working, and now the sound control center only has 1 choice listed in the set of profiles for each device (and none of the choices are "off").
What happened here? Where can I tell pulseaudio to leave the SPDIF output alone?