Force ALSA Sound on everything?

I’m having a bit of a weird Problem. I’m using a Focusrite USB Interface as my main audio Output. All Output seems to be pitched wrong (can’t 100% confirm for all applications, but am sure on 2 Games and Discord). Voices sound way to low compared to windows.
I have a feeling that this is related to pulse. I did notice it change on an earlier install (a few weeks back) after installing pulse. Plus, on a wine game that is pitch dependend (Rocksmith) is force to use Alsa through winetricks and i don’t notice any pitch shifting there.

So, is it possible to force systemwide use of ALSA or fix the pitch issues pulse is creating? How would i even fo about troubleshooting this? Other than the voice of someone i now in person, and the Sound in Games being slightly off, i don’t even know who to determine which pitch is correct or how to change that…

Put a known sound into something with a tuner? Can audacity show pitch? But then it depends on which part of the chain the pictch shift might be happening.

As an odd aside if I am hungover everything sounds pitched up slightly. It seems consistent too, such a confusing sensation.

Try these two settings:
resample-method = soxr-vhq
avoid-resampling = yes
Pulse’s audio quality is quite shit out of the box, this should be pretty close to just having alsa output systemwide since pulse either doesn’t touch it or resample at high enough quality that it is not noticeable. Soxr-vhq does use more cpu but it’s worth it imo for modern cpu’s.
Also i think your focusrite has an anolog pot on the front right? If so set your volume in pulse to 100% so it doesn’t crunch any bits, most digital volume controls suck if you go too low, not using them at all is the best.

There are more tweaks you can do but try these first.

As for getting rid of pulse, many programs won’t work without pulse like Firefox and it is ingrained in many popular desktops.

suggest change Pulseaudio default sample rate from 44.1kHz to 48kHz
Used a few USB interfaces and they never sound good at 44.1kHz

good if you have plenty of CPU power, but recommended setting of speex-float-5 is more than enough for most systems

check if your system has man speaker-test (most major distributions have it AFAIK)
that is manpage for ALSA test utility that can generate a fixed frequency test tone
need to work out command options for fixed frequency test because default test sound is pink noise to check whole frequency range

If that command doesn’t help, there is a simpler command aplay
but you would need to make a fixed frequency test .wav file for this command

If you don’t want to CLI, use an audio player that can be set to use ALSA and Pulseaudio
and use a test signal .wav file on both, to identify location of any pitch shifting
(I use Audacious, but many other players have settings for this)

Using only ALSA is a bit like kernel streaming in Windows with one application has exclusive access to audio hardware. There is a workaround in ALSA (dmix) but configuring ALSA can become complicated

IMO best solution is install Cadence and run JACK audio server.
These semi-pro interfaces work so much better with JACK.
Cadence also manages audio connections for packages that require Pulseaudio
And there are many excellent tools and applications that need JACK

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