Hum, not sure what I did, but I killed pulseaudio and started it again and now it works… Among the many things I tried:
I first added:
~/.alsoftrc in
drivers = alsa,pulse,core,oss
[pulse]
allow-moves=yes
and
$ vlc --reset-config --reset-plugins-cache
$ pulseaudio --check
$ pulseaudio -k