>If PA isn't doing it, your apps will be instead.

You were right about that, I tested it in another comment on here. I thought that resampling would happen within a kernel driver or something. But no, apparently when an app uses the alsa library, the functions that resample will happen within the app generating the sound (and thus in userland).

But don't some card have hardware resampling? Seems my sound blaster audigy from the early 2000's advertised something like that. If resampling is such a hog, why can't the sound card do it? Seems like thats the whole point?