[These comments are focused on an experimental feature in 0.7.3, apologies if this has been discussed, but I found nothing on it here or in latest source...we recognize its an area in flux]
It has been commonly noted that the Simulator has occasional problems with extant audio drivers and OpenAL, not limited to Cocos2D. Although rare, I've also seen conditions where the audio system may not initialize within the device itself causing released programs to crash on startup until the device is power cycled.
In the case of Cocos2D's PASoundMgr, if the audio engine fails to initialize, it still allocates itself. This results in a crash once the system attempts to perform any actual OpenAL command further along in the code.
Looking at the code, the error seems to be quietly ignored with nothing more than a NSLog statement and no preservation of the error condition.
This makes it impossible to take any useful actions which might include:
1) Allow querying of status so that audio commands could be skipped.
2) Returning 'nil' from sharedSound so that further actions become "no-op" situations [with careful coding for this behavior]
3) or...internally failing silently on any sound commands, not just the initialization process, so that the program continues to run.
It would be nice if PASoundMgr in a future update could better support the process of disabling sound elegantly since it is aware of the problem at the time of initialization.
Barney