Ignoring the comment you replied to, I am curious about the claim that pipewire is incompatible with the audio card.
I get that pulseaudio cannot default to using an output with speakers. This happened to me too on every single login, so I switched to pipewire, which is capable of saving settings between seessions (pulseaudio claims to support this, but it's been broken for over 10 years based on my internet searches).
I guess I got lucky that pipewire can talk to my card?
I'd expect it to be far enough up the stack where hardware compatibility wouldn't matter.
I distinctly remember having to install a package before audio would work on my machine. Needless to say, that isn't the best option if you can't rely on your eyes to find out what's missing.
Unfortunately, I'm not knowledgeable enough about how audio is done in interaction with hardware to help satisfy your curiosity.
