Okay, so I installed Arch from scratch with a minimalist set-up of OpenBox and tint2, installed alsa-utils and alsa-tools, and made that modprobe config file to disable HDMI output, just like I did when I did the netinstall of Debian. Then installed vlc and played all the files I played previously (in FLAC, ogg, mp3, etc), and both when using the default device and when selecting Analog Front Speakers subdevice, the CPU usage rarely passes the 5% mark. I've also tried foobar2000 through wine, and got the same result.
Here's some info about the alsa-utils package under Arch: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ $ pacman -Qi alsa-utils Name : alsa-utils Version : 1.1.5-2 Description : An alternative implementation of Linux sound support Architecture : x86_64 URL : http://www.alsa-project.org Licenses : GPL Groups : None Provides : None Depends On : alsa-lib>1.0.24 pciutils ncurses psmisc libsamplerate fftw Optional Deps : None Required By : None Optional For : None Conflicts With : None Replaces : None Installed Size : 2042.00 KiB Packager : Anatol Pomozov <anatol.pomo...@gmail.com> Build Date : Sat Nov 18 17:11:48 2017 Install Date : Wed Dec 13 16:44:06 2017 Install Reason : Explicitly installed Install Script : No Validated By : Signature ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ So this makes it pretty clear that I wasn't talking out of my ass, and that there's something fishy going on with Debian's implementation of ALSA, or there was something fixed between versions 1.1.3 and 1.1.5.
