Comment 42 for bug 1799007

ok, I've figured some more out with the help of system76 support:

https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/389

the TL&DR is that the issue seems to be caused by the systemd init scripts, and that stopping them all and running pulseaudio manually works fine. so this isn't really even a pulse issue, but perhaps a systemd or ubuntu packaging issue.