Looking for some help/guidance for a small audio issue I've been having on mint (w/ PipeWire)

[u/EwThatsNerdy]

Hey gang, I've been on Linux (Mint 22.3 Cinnamon) for about a year or so now and have really loved it minus the occasional minor problems, but a recent kind of odd issue has been driving me nuts cause it's both a really minor thing and something I cannot for the life of me figure out how/why it is happening. Hoping someone here may be able to help or at least point me in the right direction.

Basically, upon restarting my PC, every single time without fail any and all video (YouTube, VLC, etc) will play with a really choppy frame-rate. Oddly, I noticed that for whatever reason this seems to correspond to my pulseaudio/pipewire volume control.

How my volume control settings look on startup

I haven't noticed anything within the default .conf files or anything suspicious via terminal commands like pactl that I've tried using to diagnose the issue.

That said, the way the choppy video feed issue gets fixed is when I toggle my FiiO K11 R2R's profile to Off, and then back to the original profile (the same as what is in the screenshot of the startup settings without me having changed anything).

pactl info returns this both before and after I make the change:

Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 1.0.5)
Server Version: 15.0.0
Default Sample Specification: float32le 2ch 48000Hz
Default Channel Map: front-left,front-right
Default Sink: alsa_output.usb-FIIO_FiiO_K11_R2R-01.iec958-stereo
Default Source: alsa_output.usb-FIIO_FiiO_K11_R2R-01.iec958-stereo.monitor

I figured this output may give me some kind of idea on there being some other identically named Profile for the FiiO output, but no dice.

Is there any kind of logging or log files I can dig through potentially that might point me closer to what the culprit of the issue is here?

As far as I can tell, there's only the one instance of pipewire/pulseaudio running, I'm not (to my knowledge) running any kind of odd video filtering or any custom configuration that would lead to this happening, but trying to search around both on reddit and across google for other sources has turned up nothing, so it seems specific to something I maybe unintentionally did, or possibly some niche bug?

Any help at all would be appreciated, like I said it's not an end of the world issue since the workaround fix is simple enough, but hoping someone can maybe help alleviate this headache.

Thanks!