http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20915
--- Comment #7 from Chris chris.kcat@gmail.com 2009-12-19 20:33:48 --- I've seen this issue with some other OpenAL apps in Linux. It's just really odd behavior, though, and can't see why it happens or what could possibly trigger it (I've seen the issue come and go where OpenAL's processing remains 100% identical).
I've just narrowed it down to something in the ALSA backend, or perhaps ALSA itself.. having OpenAL Soft use OSS or Pulse fixes it for me (unfortunately disabling mmap on ALSA doesn't help). It's something to try and dig into for OpenAL 1.11...