I would have thought so too but I just watched this talk that suggests flash is the best way to go if you want sound effects in your html5 game (click on the second to last slide to skip): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015669/A-Practical-Guide-to-Bu...
If there's a better solution I'd love to hear it, since this wouldn't work on iOS devices afaik.
The technology is in transition. Flash is the least-worst option for now, but it won't be a year from today. Impressive new Web Audio APIs are already in the pre-release Chrome and Firefox, and I believe some just landed in iOS7 as well.
Pre-release? they were in ios6, been in chrome since version 10, ios6, safari 6, and the whole idea of them CAME from firefox. What is coming out in firefox now is the standardised version of what's already there.
as for IE support, well, there's not really that much risk in using soundmanager/flash if you still need to support 7 and 8, is there? I even discovered that old MS even exposed some nice windows media activex controls that you can use to do simple sound playing stuff without loading up a flash plugin, if you're that serious about backwards compatibility.
Forget a year from now. You can start using this stuff today, and by the time you release a year from now, things will be even better.
