Try the “audio” group, instead of alsa.
It’s a little better now. I did some cleanups in my home directory using ‘find’ to locate anything ‘pulse’ related. I’m actually starting to think at least part of my problem is this HK speaker system. It has some of its own sound processing built in, and I’m having a hard time configuring it to be totally neutral. I’m seriously considering just replacing the speaker system with some cheap speakers I have from years back that I never threw out for some reason.