Hey, so I am losing my mind here. I can NOT get rid of this severe popping and crackling I get on all audio on all sources and all outputs. I am running pipewire as the audio system but I just cant get it to stop. I have already altered my pipewire.conf as seems to be the only thing the internet at large will ever recommend, it has ZERO effect. as an example...

    default.clock.quantum       = 4096
    default.clock.min-quantum   = 4096
    default.clock.max-quantum   = 8192

I have used values starting at 16 and doubled it every time and tested it up to some pretty massive values, 8192 so far and nothing. Below is the output of pw-top just so you know I am not joking as to the values I have tried.

   ID  QUANT   RATE    WAIT    BUSY   W/Q   B/Q  ERR FORMAT           NAME
R   56   4096  48000  55.0us  11.1us  0.00  0.00    0    S16LE 2 48000 alsa_output.pci
R   61   3600  48000  22.9us  19.5us  0.00  0.00    0    F32LE 2 48000  + Firefox

Ive tried dozens of different value, I've tried different rates, nothing. I have already posted on Reddit, that didn't help because as soon as I tried the values and that didn't work, no one ever responded again.

For completeness, I am running in a VM but it's a unique situation. I am running an Arch guest on a Slackware host. I have a dedicated GPU passed through properly and it does indeed have multi-function enabled. I am running an AMD 7950X with half the cores dedicated to the gaming VM and the other half left for the host as it pulls double duty as a storage, container, and virtualization host. I have 64GB of DDR5 and it is running at 6000 with even matching the XMP profile. The system is under very little load during testing but it makes zero difference what the load is anyway.

As a sanity check I spun up a Windows VM with identical settings except for the TPM stuff and it ran fine. I used to run pop_OS for a short time and I don't recall this ever being an issue there but it's been a while. However, if it were doing it there, I would have noticed.

I predominantly use this setup in my living room as a gaming centric VM that also pulls double duty as a Media center type thing so the audio issues are a deal breaker. I do this since this just happens to be where my server and the desk shelf are located, in the living room, so it makes sense to use this kind of setup. 9x out of 10 I am using the HDMI output of the nVidia 3070 TI but I do use a USB DAC and I have tested it. I also have tested Bluetooth output which seems ALMOST unaffected but laggy by almost a second or more so essentially unusable so I stick with the USB DAC instead if I need to use headphones. I could have sworn I head the pops just quietly when Bluetooth audio was playing but I could have been imagining it.

Please help, I am at my wits end, google, Arch wiki, driver updates, downgrades, betas, different kernels, I have tried everything I can possibly think of and nothing works.

Any help you guys can provide would be purely awesome. I have been using Arch now for maybe 5-6 months now and I am getting used to it and starting to really love what it is but this audio issues has been a thorn in my side the whole time and I am about ready to start distro hopping to try and find something that doesn't have this issue. Please, help!

Thanks!