I tried installing pavucontrol, and it showed 2 profiles which I also see in alsamixer, one for my sound card and the other for my hdmi output (spdif in alsamixer) from my graphics card
Turning off the audio card profile then trying to turn it on again, pavucontrol crashed with this message, and trying to restart it gave this result again as it crashed as soon as the window started to appear.
$ pavucontrol
**
ERROR:devicewidget.cc:100:void DeviceWidget::setVolume(const pa_cvolume&, bool): assertion failed: (v.channels == channelMap.channels)
Bail out! ERROR:devicewidget.cc:100:void DeviceWidget::setVolume(const pa_cvolume&, bool): assertion failed: (v.channels == channelMap.channels)
Aborted
Then while trying to write this and listening to some music on soundcloud the desktop froze up and the music went like a stuck record, repeating the same bit over and over. (Amazing digital streaming could recreate this classic problem!)
So I uninstalled pavucontrol and everything seems OK again.
I have these alsa and pipe packages, also the alsa service is enabled:
$ pacman -Qs alsa
local/alsa-card-profiles 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - ALSA card profiles
local/alsa-lib 1.2.6.1-1
An alternative implementation of Linux sound support
local/alsa-plugins 1:1.2.6-1
Additional ALSA plugins
local/alsa-tools 1.2.5-1
Advanced tools for certain sound cards
local/alsa-topology-conf 1.2.5.1-1
ALSA topology configuration files
local/alsa-ucm-conf 1.2.6.2-2
ALSA Use Case Manager configuration (and topologies)
local/alsa-utils 1.2.6-1
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - Utilities
local/alsa-utils-openrc 20210505-2 (openrc-world)
OpenRC alsa-utils init script
local/pipewire-alsa 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - ALSA configuration
local/zita-alsa-pcmi 0.3.2-3.1
The successor of clalsadrv, provides easy access to ALSA PCM devices.
$ pacman -Qs pipe
local/gst-plugin-pipewire 1:0.3.40-1
Multimedia graph framework - pipewire plugin
local/libpipeline 1.5.4-1
a C library for manipulating pipelines of subprocesses in a flexible and convenient way
local/pipewire 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor
local/pipewire-alsa 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - ALSA configuration
local/pipewire-jack 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - JACK support
local/pipewire-pulse 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - PulseAudio replacement
local/pipewire-v4l2 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - V4L2 interceptor
local/pipewire-zeroconf 1:0.3.40-1
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - Zeroconf support
local/wireplumber 0.4.5-2
Session / policy manager implementation for PipeWire
Possibly my alsa setup is conflicting with pavucontrol and / or some other packages / setup are required to support it, but it was apparently problematic for me during this brief test.