I believe personal experience is anecdotal at best and not "the universe". My anecdotal experience with pulseaudio is that it simply does not like my setup (internal sound card + 4 external usb card + occasional hdmi sound transport) and having an occasional pop or crack on a 10kW PA system is not desirable.
I've read a pulseaudio guru post explaining that when you know what you are doing you can work out a pulseaudio config that reduce pulseaudio latency issues, real time resampling, drop outs and high cpu usage. Just don't use the default config.
internal sound card + 4 external usb card + occasional hdmi sound transport) and having an occasional pop or crack on a 10kW PA system is not desirable.
This is a common issue. It happens on Windows and Mac, as well. Am I to understand you don't experience it with some other way of handling sound (e.g. not using PulseAudio)? Are all of them being driven by the same program?
I DJ, and have used multiple independent interfaces in the past; there were frequently pops and warbles as the various timing crystals in the various interfaces fell out of sync and were forced back into sync by the software. It happened on both Windows and Linux (though it was slightly less pronounced on Linux, and I never figured out why). JACK might be the best way to deal with that problem on Linux, though I never tried it (I just switched to a dedicated DJ controller with multiple outs and headphone output).
But, it's a common enough problem that most DJ software has something about the problem in their FAQ.
I've read a pulseaudio guru post explaining that when you know what you are doing you can work out a pulseaudio config that reduce pulseaudio latency issues, real time resampling, drop outs and high cpu usage. Just don't use the default config.