Two follow-ups from hands-free testing:
- Audio cues had no off-switch: empty sound fields fall back to the freedesktop
system chime, so wakeword/recording always made noise. Add a [sounds] enabled
master flag (default true) exposed as "Play audio cues" in Settings → Input.
When off, _play_cue/_play_sound are no-ops — fully silent operation.
- The VAD level meter (sounddevice/PortAudio) leaked harmless thread-teardown
errors ("pthread_join ... failed", "PaUnixThread_Terminate ... failed") to the
terminal on every clip end. PortAudio writes these straight to fd 2, so wrap
the stream open/close in a fd-level stderr suppressor (_quiet_c_stderr).
Tests: cue gating respects the master switch (16 passed).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>