In case my original post wasn't clear enough on that, OpenAL is effectively already removed from the next version FS-UAE. I've written new code which (currently) uses SDL2 for audio (which again uses miscellaneous backends) or directly uses ALSA, and I'm not planning to add support for OpenAL since the SDL backend seems to work very well cross-platform.
Btw, one "problem" with current FS-UAE is that if you have a powerful computer which emulates frames really quickly, you cannot have sub-20-ms audio latency, because FS-UAE emulates a frame in one go (If FS-UAE emulates a frame infinitely fast, then FS-UAE generates 20 ms audio instantly, which means you get a least 20 ms buffering). The next version uses high-resolution timers to emulate more in real-time (sleeping between scanlines when necessary, somewhat similar to how WinUAE runs in beam-racing mode I suppose) which means that audio latency can go really low. I've successfully run some tests with around 2-3 ms buffering with ALSA/FS-UAE combined.
On the other hand, to minimize input lag, you want to postpone emulation as close to rendering time as possible, which means you need bigger audio buffers, so there is a trade-off here. And also maybe no point in having less audio latency than video lag.
The default setup is still to be determined I guess, but the point is that FS-UAE should be able to perform better (and also with lower audio latency by default)
