Created attachment 872253 [details]
sound devices

I'm experiencing some annoying sound problems, that are occurring only during
some circumstances (apparently under heavier system load, but I don't know if
this is a factor), and appeared starting from about a month ago (end of
December 2023). Before that, everything was working normally.

I'm running a fully updated tumbleweed, and I can notice this problem mainly
when running games under Wine.

Basically, the game starts fine, and after a while (there is not a fixed time),
the audio starts crackling/scratching. Sometimes this just distorts the sound
output, sometimes it is so severe to mute any sound completely.

- It does not happen with every application. At the moment, browsers, VLC,
spotify, and so on play sound correctly. Games run under Wine (through flatpak)
and some other Linux games (still flatpak) have this problem. When this
happens, when I close an app that causes this problem, sometimes even other
apps (said browsers, spotify, etc) have their sounds distorted, at least for a
while.

- I'm not sure about this, but I think that I noticed this problem more often
when there is a heavier system load (especially disk I/O), but to be honest,
after all this time trying to figure this out without results, it may be me
drawing unrelated conclusions.

- This problem occurs only with a specific audio device, that controls my
laptop built-in speakers: an "AMD Family 17h/19h HD Audio". My system is also
equipped with an "AMD Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio" device that controls
audio from the HDMI port, which works correctly when I connect it to i.e. an
external TV. Everything is also working correctly with Bluetooth headphones or
wired headphones connected to the jack port.

This problem is occurring with every possible configuration that I can't test:
- Both with pipewire (my default engine, which was working correctly until a
month ago) and pulseaudio
- Both with my user account and with a brand new test account that I created
just for testing this
- By logging in both with Wayland and X11 (and even ICEWM)
- With every Kernel that I was able to test right now (current 6.7.x, 6.6.x,
6.5.x), but only starting from the end of December (before that, no problems
even with these versions)

I'm very puzzled and mildly annoyed by my inability to find a solution.
From what I can see, this seems to be unrelated to my specific user config and
I am unable to understand what should I do.

Every possible related issue that I found by googling is mainly related to not
having sound at all, which is easily diagnosed, while in my case this occurs in
ways that I am not able to correctly pinpoint and troubleshoot.

If it is useful, I've opened a question on Superuser, but it has received much
attention. Anyway, it's here 
https://superuser.com/q/1827353/170331

I'm adding some useful info as attachments, feel free to ask for more.
Thanks!