It was easy in 11.1
im afraid that you can’t change from pulseaudio to another in the latest release of distros ( i think ubuntu 9.1 done the same)
do you have any particular problems that are causing you to want to switch to another (ask away!)? Pulse audio really, is a good thing Why you should care about PulseAudio (and how to start doing it) unless it isn’t working correctly.
The sound is poor quality and when i close a window with anything playing it suddenly spikes, im afraid to use it with headphones. On 11.1 i just used either OSS or ESD and had no such problems. Also i like having the choice of which to use and not having it forced upon me.
Under Gnome, the solution for me was to install gmixer. It allowed me to select a non-pulseaudio device and adjust volume – something alsamixer would not do.
In KDE it’s easy in 11.2… go into ‘Personal Settings (Configure Desktop)’ Select ‘Multimedia’ and change it.
sound quality is poor in what ? If you do not specify in what application it is not really possible to give specific help.
Did you try going to the preferences/setup in each of your multimedia applications and change the output mode to something else? Perhaps to OSS ? or to alsa?