Hello and welcome,
I don't have an answer about pipewire.
When I got bored of pulseaudio, I just used alsa :
I removed the pulseaudio packages except one: libpulse.
I installed qastools which offers a nice and very practical mixer :
sudo pacman -Sy qastools
Then I listed my audio cards:
cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [HDMI ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI HDMI
HDA ATI HDMI at 0xfce60000 irq 96
1 [Generic ]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio Generic
HD-Audio Generic at 0xfc900000 irq 98
I created/modified /etc/asound.conf
And added this to select card1:
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.ctl.card 1