I am not sure that this problem is specific to my setup, where my audio comes from an nvidia 1650 passed through to a KVM virtual machine, but it seems that many people on bare metal are having this problem too
The problem occures randomly, and when it does, pipewire would be consuming a lot of CPU even though no audio is running
pipewire for those of you who don’t know is the new pulse audio, it comes with most modern distributions !
The solution when this happens for now sems to be to restart pipewire !
systemctl --user restart pipewire.service