@argv_minus_one Yeah pretty much. This DSP needs to be implemented somewhere and PipeWire ended up being the best option. And it does supersede most other frameworks/use cases (PA, JACK, etc.) so there's very little reason not to use it.

Though we switched our users over earlier last year anyway, because PA was broken with headphone jack hotplug and PW worked fine, and it wasn't worth spending time debugging that when we already planned to require PW for the upcoming speaker support.

The speaker safety stuff, though, will be a stand-alone daemon working together with the kernel driver. So if you really want to use PA or anything else, it'll sound (very) bad, but you won't blow up your speakers. If the safety daemon dies or is not present, the kernel will fall back to a very low but safe volume cap.