Strange noise when video is buffering, Ubuntu 22.04

A week back, after a Zorin update, my USB lost power, so I thought I’d just switch to Ubuntu 22.04 based distros. And it seems all of them have the same problem…

When I play a video in the browser (tried Firefox and Brave) when it buffers, a noise (volume varies) would replace what I should hear.

I tried the following and nothing changes the problem:

  • Go full PipeWire
  • Go full Pulseaudio
  • Disable powers saving options the tlp(?)
  • Disable bluetooth from startup (saw some error about bluetooth when speaker started up)

The only think I can think of to do is to reinstall Zorin (the old working version, kept the installation USB) and not update the kernel. But then I worried about not getting the security updates.

From my quest for solutions, it seems some other folks might be having the noise issue (so machine/hardware specific, I’m guessing) but no one seems to have a solution that works…

It would be best to fix it on Ubuntu 22.04 (kernel 15.19?) or else I will have to go back to my old Zorin version (so the USB power would still work). In that case, can I downgrade the kernel (15.11) and still get the security upgrade? If not, would firewall + VPN be good enough for security?