Hi,
thanks for your offer to help.
All in all, PulseAudio is just like a "frontend" for Alsa.
The latest versions of PulseAudio included a nice feature called "avoid-resample".
Before that, everything that was played through PulseAudio would be "downsampled" or "upsampled" to be played back at 16/44.
The only problem with that option is that, if you launch let's say Google Chrome (that cannot playback in anthing else than 16/44) BEFORE you launch other PulseAudio services, that app will "hijack" Pulseaudio and Pulse will then resample everything to 16/44 again :-(
There's is one thing that you can do if you have say TosLink and USB on your computer.
If you want to use ALSA with "Toslink" then you just can turn off the Toslink output in PulseAudio and then use that socket as ALSA playback socket.
Works like a charm...
Still, you cannot redirect my favourite Audio Player (Lollypop) to use ALSA socket.
So you have to stick with Pulse or use another player (I like gmusic browser and Cantata... and those cna both be configured to use one of the audio output with ALSA).
Still, ALSA also sometimes resamples things and that is somewhat misleading too...
That is why I decided to go for the dedicated music player... It runs pretty nicely, of course without part of the flexibility of the computer player
Regards.