my sound worked out of the box with pulseaudio -- installed the package, added start-pulseaudio-x11 to my ~/.xprofile (arch doesn't have anything by default), a

my sound worked out of the box with pulseaudio -- installed the package, added start-pulseaudio-x11 to my ~/.xprofile (arch doesn't have anything by default), and it worked. even skype (!) worked out of the box (both speakers and microphones).