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I'm currently looking for a good, FOSS (free (open-license) and open-source) sound engine for a game (or games) that I'm thinking of working on; and if nothing else, I could just stick the source up for others to play with . I'm really doing this right now just for the learning experience.

Language is C++. For the graphics, I've chosen Irrlicht. Simulation will be custom.

A sound engine?  I don't think i've hear of this,  and can't find anything with a quick google search;  do explain?

Basically, a sound engine is a part of the game engine that handles the playback of sounds, including calculating 'position' (balance between the speakers) (ie, for stereo and up)

I'd go with OpenAL which is LGPL for most platforms, and is compatible with Irrlicht.
There are others, but I'd say that it's the upper of all the choices, other libraries may have more features, but I think that OpenAL just works better. (just my opinion though.)

And here's a list of the rest of what is compatible with Irrlicht… http://www.irrlicht3d.org/wiki/index.php?n=Main.SoundLibraries

From the naev people (Who I'm doing some art assets for), I head OpenAL actually isn't that great. In fact, it tends to be pretty buggy and irritating to work with.

[Hypothetical]

And that's true of most all free libraries…

Irrlicht it's self is buggy, that's just how many community open source projects are.
The trick is finding the one that is the least buggy and still lets you do what you want.
What you should do is some research on the issues of a certain library, whether OpenAL, or something else, and see if what you want to do will even be affected.

For example, maybe there's problems with 48Khz audio when used with 3D projection, but 44.1Khz is fine.
(I don't know if that's an actual problem, it's just a Hypothetical one.)
And if the bug can be worked around, then it's not a real problem, that's the price of most free and open source community projects.

Working around the problem may not sound like a very good solution, and it's not, but that's just how Coding from free resources works sometimes.

On a side note, I wonder how much work it would be to add in support for DX11/10 and OpenGL 4

You might want to try irrKlang. It's not FOSS, but it is free for non-commercial use and the license fee for commercial use is pretty darn cheap. It's also super-easy to use, like irrLicht.

Adding support for DX10/11 and OpenGL 4 to irrLicht would be... quite a lot of work, to put it mildly. If it wasn't, the irrLicht developers would have already done it by now.