I'm got the HDMI output from my AMD RX 580 graphics card inputting to an HDMI TV, which acts as a monitor/sound combination for my tower. The audio I've got is therefore "Audio over HDMI".
This "Audio over HDMI" often distorts sporadically and won't correct until I restart Ubuntu, which happens to be 20.04. The audio will sound fine for a while, until it starts distorting again, and I'm forced to restart.
I've noticed I can trigger sound distortion on my "Audio over HDMI" interface by simply starting the GNOME Orca screen reader. Orca will start reading my screen but the sound is extremely distorted. I imagine these two issues are related and perhaps this is a clue to what is going on.
How do I fix this sound issue? What are my options?
Same problem here. Not a solution, but a workaround is to kill & restart the sound deamons:
That is at least better than restarting the entire PC. Unfortunately, with the latest update, the problem seems to be worse in the sense that the deamons often won't start (they seem to be ignoring the kill when they are occupied or something similar).
Generally I won't have this issue until I suspend, possibly with sound still playing. I think it might be some kind of bug entering an invalid state after the system wakes up.