I agree here, pavucontrol is the best way to manipulate your audio input/outputs, which comes from the pulseaudio team as authoritative control UI. Sometimes I've found I need it just to make audio work at all and set default sinks.
Most of the desktop-level controls seem to be sorely lacking, confusing, or just too simple to handle when you have a lot of input/output devices. Most are just wrappers around the same pulseaudio subsystem, just with varying degrees of (generally poor) ui's to be built into the desktop by someone shoving a square peg in a round hole. Best just to go the source, pavucontrol, it's always been far more intuitive than trying to figure out what the desktop version.
It allows you to do some interesting audio routing things too... One example, I had a windoze xp vm I'd use with these ancient crap chinese wifi cameras I have, one of which watches my birds. The cam uses a decrepit activex plugin that I could route "mic" sound at the cams, so would pipe a monitor of my speaker under linux to the mic on my windoze vm with pavucontrol, set to send mic audio to my camera to play music for the birds using whatever mp3 player I'm using (or yell at them when being annoying) under linux.
Also great when you have a bunch of usb audio devices too for selecting per-app routing (headsets, conference speakers, multiple input/output on different sound/video cards, etc).
-mb