Andres Cimmarusti wrote at Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:02 PM:

First of all, thank you for your feedback. It's been quite helpful / insightful

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There are ways to configure pulseaudio to allow the user to select which PCM device to use on a given sound card. David Henningsson made this work for NVIDIA GPUs at least in Ubuntu, and I imagine the same technique could be applied to Intel devices too.

Mmm.. just in Ubuntu? was this work submitted upstream? It appears there are some related fixes shown in the Ubuntu pulseaudio changelog:

I think the following Ubuntu bug covers the patch:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/716371 See the patch in comment #2.

Hopefully David will chime in on upstreaming status etc.

The following might be interesting; at least some of it will apply to non-NVIDIA graphics cards:

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/gpu-hdmi-audio-document/gpu-hdmi-audio.html