Nope, I’ve checked and I don’t have any PulseAudio, JACK, or other audio packages that could interfere. This install has only ever used PipeWire for audio.
Could be kernel related, I don’t know. That’d be quite over my head, but I’ve had this issue using both the standard linux kernel and the zen kernel.
I didn’t see anything in journalctl’s logs that relates to audio as far as I can tell.
Reinstalling alsa utils twice? Interesting and weird.
Want to know what’s even more fun? I need to re-install alsa-utils thrice now after properly enabling pipewire.service like I did on that other comment thread :P