Audio Issues - Fresh Install 15.10

Hello,

This is a long-time issue for me, and I am super motivated to get it fixed and I have a bit of time on my hands for the next few days, so hopefully I can answer any questions that will help get this resolved.

The (current) issue: My current audio issue is that, after a fresh install of lubuntu, the audio doesn't appear to work at all outside of kodi. I'm ruing my audio/video through my hdmi to my tv, and coecting my speakers to the tv. I've tried ruing a handful of audio/video files on the default programs, as well as youtube videos in firefox. No sound, whatsoever. If I open my video files in kodi, everything works just fine.

The history of this issue: This fresh install is the most recent attempt to resolve a different audio issue. I've tried several distros with the same goal in mind: lightweight, simple, htpc. With mint, openSuse, and ubuntu, I kept ruing into situation where my audio and video would occasionally (every 2-7 minutes), very slightly glitch. It was as if it were skipping fraction of a second to catch up to a buffer or something (I don't know if thats what it is, that's just how it acts). The pursuit of a solution always lead me through a tangle of pulseaudio configurations and a never ending rabbit hole of minor tweaks and package installations that, at best, didn't fix anything.
After a few weeks of this incessant tweaking, and persisting problem, I opted to apply the KISS principle to solve the issue and spent a bit of effort installing a minimalist arch-linux flavor to run my pc. In particular, I refused to instal pulseaudio. This was heaven, except it had the same issue that I have now, where audio only worked in kodi. Then, I assumed that this was an acceptable consequence of my extreme minimalist approach. Now, however, using a more feature-rich-by-default distro, has made me want to get this issue fixed.

The caveat: I picked lubuntu specifically to avoid pulseaudio. I installed pulseaudio yesterday and, while I get audio everywhere, the exact same periodic glitching occurred. I re-set to a clean lubuntu install this moing and I'm back to audio in kodi only, with no glitching. So, I want to get my audio working outside of kodi, in particular while watching netflix in chrome, WITHOUT pulseaudio if possible.

Thank you, in advance for any help you can give me. I will do my best to provide you with any information that will help.