Jack

Regarding running Jack, it's not nearly as hard as you make it out to be. It took me the better part of an hour to do right.

Jack doesn't REQUIRE a RT kernel, it's a nice to have that reduces latency, but I haven't found latency to be a problem.

Getting Jack to work with Pulseaudio in the chain I've built is trivial, simply give Jack a duplex interface that is turned off in Pulse, and load jack sink/source modules as needed in Pulse to link the two servers.
- Atomic