Jon F :
one of those timeless battles, like emacs vs vi

Ah yes, the timeless battle for second place. nano ftw.

To be honest, I’m not sure that I want to open up the whole PulseAudio/JACK can of worms. In my research, I learned a lot about both systems, and see the fight as one of those timeless battles, like emacs vs vi and gnome vs kde.

All I can say is that I tend to agree with the maintainers of PulseAudio about it not being properly configured in distributions. In my case, you can see that all it took to get my audio working was to install a PulseAudio front end, and choose the correct audio profile after a reboot.

Now why wasn’t that front end present in Kubuntu and available from the System Settings > Multimedia dialog? I’d love to know.

Glad you got your kde sound to work.
The one thing that I did find amusing is the irony of having to use pulse-audio in kde to get the job done. There are so many Ubuntu(gnome) users that hate pulse-audio as it is often a mess on some hardware.

One such example from Patrick Davila of Linux link tech show podcast and host of mythcast.
http://pdavila.homelinux.org:8080/blog/?p=369