Animatable playback control for Speakers

I know that speakers are probably rarely used outside of BGE, but I personally find that that's only the case because they ARE lacking in a lot of functionally that Blender could easily offer.

For example is it not possible to stop the playback of a longer sample. You can time the start of that playback in the NLA editor, but you can't stop it. You can start it again and even make it overlap with a previous playback but you can stop not a single one of these save for disabling the speaker altogether by animating the volume to 0.

So I was thinking about a minimalistic way that could be used to implement this control without needing UI changes and expanding the interpretion of the volume seemed best for that. Given that a volume of 0 technically disables the speaker already I'd propose that animating the volume to a value of < 0 and > -0.5 pauses the playback and a value of < -0.5 stops it altogether. If pause is technically difficult scrap that for somewhen else and just make < 0 = stop.

The playback could then be restarted by animating the volume to > 0 again.

I am also aware that the VSE offers a great deal more control over things like this but it also lacks the positional factor so if you depend on that for your animation you can hardly avoid speakers, so why not expand their usefulness since they are already there anyways?