When I got all fancy and moved to the 5.x kernel and Pulseaudio 12.2, I had one big new problem: My sound card would make an ugly popping noise every time it started playing sound again. Very, very 90s.
Fortunately, this can be fixed. Thanks to hateball for this solution. Stick this in your ~/.config/pulse/default.pa
:
.include /etc/pulse/default.pa unload-module module-suspend-on-idle
And kill/restart pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k
.