[ANNOUNCE] New Mixer Handling in PA 0.9.16/F12

[Michal Hlavinka]

> 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.