By default in a lot of distros, pulseaudio will auto start and respawn when stopped. In /etc/pulse/client.conf having the "autospawn = no" line allows you to start and stop pulseaudio as needed. Beyond that the .asoundrc with the four pulse elements is sufficient on most systems that I've used (debian based). Baring special use cases like pulse over jackd. At which point you need the default and daemon configurations in the home config file location for pulse. And the pulseaudio-module-jack package (debian).

$ pulseaudio --start
$ pulseaudio --kill

The way that I started and stopped it when I used it. +/- as it's been a while. Note that it's --kill, as using --stop does nothing. And if autospawn = yes (default), both will effectively do nothing as it respawns when stopped.

$ pavucontrol

To adjust the settings, like which soundcard(s) and which mic(s) to use. Pulseaudio is a needy thing (100MB+ of RAM and 10% less fps on glxgears in my case) so if you have low ram and slow or overloaded cpu traits it will likely not be a pleasant ride. But it should work, mostly.

This error, I came across myself today. And I didn't find much for solutions when searching the various search engines.

I previous did not have this issue. Google hinted at an X display open type error. And then I recalled that I was trying to run pulseaudio as a user other than the one who started X. And xhost to the rescue.

As the user who started X, iceweasel (the user who did NOT start X) in this case.
And the issue went away (again). I use startx to start X in my case.