I own the Redragon H818 PELOPS as my daily driver and I installed Pipewire when I installed Manjaro a month ago. Today I installed the lib32-libpulse-16.1-1 package (along with lib32-flac-1.3.4-3, lib32-libasyncns-1:0.8+r3+g68cd5af-1, lib32-libogg-1.3.5-1, lib32-libsndfile-1.1.0-1, lib32-libvorbis-1.3.7-1, lib32-libxtst-1.2.3-3, and lib32-opus-1.3.1-2) to allow an old 32-bit game to run on WINE.
This game has a terrible PC port, mainly because the game only supports 5.1 audio and I attempted to switch to Digital Surround 5.1 (IEC958/AC3) Output from Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output through PulseAudio Volume Control but was met with a terrible loud static-y rattling sound every time I try to use 5.1 audio.
Glad to know that this issue isn’t exclusive to my setup only. I was scared that I made a mistake during the installation or something and I have to do it all again.
Hopefully someone has an idea what we’re experiencing and we get our issue solved soon.
So I got back to my main computer after it was unusable for a few days because the RAM sticks have died prematurely and during this time, I set up Arch on another computer with pipewire as the audio driver.
I plugged in the same headset and then set it as 5.1 audio and the same rattling noise was present.
I suspect that loud static-y rattling sound you are both experiencing is what unconverted digital audio sounds like when played to an analog audio device
Neither headset claims to support AC3 digital audio
OEM software to support audio processing for virtual 7.1 surround is not likely to work on Linux
stereo and the mic work perfectly
If headset is working as expected to support analog stereo audio, I suggest using pavucontrol --tab=5 to ensure headset is using a working stereo Profile and click the padlock icon to lock the Profile