FWIW, you can query ALC_DEFAULT_ALL_DEVICES_SPECIFIER (with ENUMERATE_ALL), ALC_DEFAULT_DEVICE_SPECIFIER (standard playback), and ALC_CAPTURE_DEVICE_SPECIFIER (record) to get the default device as seen by OpenAL, instead of taking the first as the default.
Just make sure to query the default after the device list, since querying the device list can invoke a re-probing of available devices/backends.