'Twas brillig, and stan at 10/02/09 03:57 did gyre and gimble:
(in pulse, one size fits all).
While I don't want to comment on the finer points of this thread, I will say that pulse 0.9.15 will be able to switch "profiles" on the fly.
I'm not 100% sure if it currently supports switching sample rates, but this should be trivial to implement now if it's not.
This should allow for an app which requires high quality output to request a specific hardware sample rate. Not sure how this would work in practice in terms of what apps are allowed to do this etc. but it should prevent software resampling kicking in in some circumstances.
Apologies if I've misinterpreted this new functionality (and it is a little theoretical in terms of putting it into practice), but I think i'm right :)
Col