one of the reasons i started playing with Artix was to see if it solved a problem with external USB sound cards - the problem...
once the card is in use for about 15-20 minutes, such as listening to music (source doesn't matter), the sound starts to skip every second or two - often this is described as "popping", but it's more like the sound stops (silence) for 100 ms or so, then plays ok for 1-2 seconds before repeating
this occurs with Manjaro and Artix (KDE, PulseAudio) and with the Schiit Hel 2 and ARC MK2 AMP/DAC combos
seems to me this could be a fundamental USB problem/configuration issue, but i don't know
nothing on the Arch wiki has helped me
Have you tried without pulseaudio to see if there is a difference?
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
**********
To see the names of the loaded modules:
cat /proc/asound/modules
0 snd_hda_intel
1 snd_hda_intel
2 snd_usb_audio
To see the cards and their numbers:
$ 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
2 [Camera]: USB-Audio - USB 2.0 Camera
To set snd_usb_audio position :
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#Set_the_default_sound_card
You could also check power settings in powertop, there can be some sort of USB autosuspend
Don't forget to install volumeicon.
It's keybind to control volume without pulse audio.