Pulseaudio is opinionated in favour of quality. For example if attaching an input to an output in pulseaudio it will resample by a minuscule amount to sync the

Pulseaudio is opinionated in favour of quality. For example if attaching an input to an output in pulseaudio it will resample by a minuscule amount to sync the clocks (eg 47999hz to 48000hz). This sort of thing does not come for free, and any other solution that is using less CPU may be cutting corners in areas like this. For me Pulseaudio is still my weapon of choice for running a dedicated realtime DSP where the input and output are on separate cards/clocks, but I can see how it has grown beyond sane scope for ordinary desktop usage