Can you force unlock an alsa device with type "hw"?

edit

I'm using alsa audio for digital output to an external DAC. It works well, but some processes (eg. firefox) lock the audio device even when no sound is playing, so I have to kill firefox before playing music through a different app. Is there a way to force-unlock an alsa hw device without terminating the process?

My reason for using alsa with type "hw" is to output an unmodified digital waveform to the external DAC. I do not want to use type "dmix" or type "plug" as these will resample the waveform, and it's easy to tell the difference with a high quality DAC & headphones. Pulseaudio also resamples the waveform.

I've read about JACK, but I can't install it as I don't have root access to this machine, and the current alsa-plugins source doesn't compile for Fedora 17.

This is my .asoundrc file :

pcm.!default {
  type hw
  card 2
}

ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card 2
}