My message was for G8DQX regarding pulseaudio being broken, presumably in general based on how he worded that statement.

As to your problem regarding the checkbox resulting in an error, are you sure pulseaudio is running?  How are you checking?

I believe that server string relates to pulseaudio receiving audio from, or perhaps sending audio to, a remote server.  It is blank in my setup.

So far, pulseaudio has worked fine for me.  I have just now switched to using rdp to access my Pi remote (instead of VNC).  I now plan to try to get audio streamed over the network from the Pi to my Macbook.  This will require compiling and adding some libraries to pulseaudio.