Ubuntu Multimedia :: Long Delay After Playing Any Audio ?

I'm having a problem where almost every audio player creates a 2-3 second delay after playing any audio.

I'm working on some text-to-speech using espeak and festival. Festival would provide much better speech quality, but it created a 2-3 second delay after any speech before the application exited, which prevents using it. When I started investigating the issue, it turned out that many other programs display the same behavior.

For example, if I play a 1-second WAV of silence using "play", it displays "Done" very soon and then waits for 2-3 seconds before exiting. mplayer does the same. mpg123 does the same. mpg321 does the same. ogg123 does the same.

When playing multiple files mpg123 and ogg123 do not generate the pause between the files, but mplayer does. I'm wondering can there be a bug that causes programs to hang when closing the audio device?

That's so many programs it must be some kind of problem in the system, not the individual programs. However not every program displays this behavior; espeak exits immediately after the speech has ended. (Might it for instance exit without closing the audio device properly?)

I haven't noticed anything similar before I upgraded to 10.10. I'm running XUbuntu on a Thinkpad T60. The laptop has an Intel HD Audio with AD1981HD codec [url].