You always had this issue, or is it something recent ?
if you don’t open pavucontrol, do you still have the same issue ?
Can you try that : ?
Audio is scratchy [Need someone to comment if this is still usefull]
It may be a power-saving issue with the sound card.
In the “audio-template” and/or "dom0", create the file ‘/etc/modprobe.d/50-snd.conf’ with the following content:
options snd_hda_intel power_save=0
And can you try to apply that too ? :
And maybe check “dmesg” and “journalctl -xe” in dom0 & sys-audio to see if you find some idea/suspicious things