http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495
--- Comment #321 from Stefan Dösinger stefandoesinger@gmx.at 2011-08-08 07:32:36 CDT --- OpenAL turned out to be no good for our purposes, so we went back to the model of writing multiple backends in Wine itself. The transition to a mmdevapi-based driver model is mostly complete, if I am not mistaken only dsound needs to be reimplemented on top of mmdevapi - winmm is already done.
Maarten Lankhorst has a mostly working PA driver in his git repo. However it handles only mmdevapi and not dsound, so it's no good until dsound is moved over to mmdevapi as well. Besides I think most people prefer to talk to PA via Alsa. Andrew Eikum is has been working on the annoying bug that caused random sound loss and a bugfix for this problem was committed to the PA and alsa-pulse(part of alsa-plugins) git trees.