LM18.3 Sound quality reduction when opening Sound Settings

[folium]

Hello!

EDIT EDIT: I just noticed that this problem is still persisting. I've installed all but level 4-5 updates as usual after my original posts. At some point I thought this problem had vanished, but now it's still as in the original post.

Repeatable problem: I watch a youtube video with Firefox and when I open Sound Settings the sound quality goes down. A bit reduction type of effect, if you know what I mean.

I have a fresh install. I installed all the updates except for level 4-5 ones. I installed Steam and logged into Firefox Sync. That's all I've done.

This rig is different from the one in my signature:
LM18.3 Cinnamon 64-bit 3.6.7 (4.10.0-38-generic kernel)
AMD Ryzen 5 1400
7.8GiB RAM
Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 USB

Please let me know if you need any additional info. Thank you

[folium]

I don't know if this post is checked as SOLVED still by the moderators but it's still an existing bug for me.

[rene]

The thing that came to mind was resampling kicking in due to "Sound Settings" opening the device for its 44100 sound effects while you were playing e.g. 48000 audio from youtube, but I'm not myself able to confirm any variant of that theory: opening "Sound Settings" does not open the audio device (as can be verified by monitoring /proc/asound/cardX/pcmYp/subZ/hw_params for applicable values of X, Y and Z) until you actually play a sound effect and moreover, if opening "Sound Settings" while 48000 audio is playing, it's the sound effect that get upsampled from 44100.

Still, I suppose that trying whether or not using a different resampler gets you a different experience might still be useful. In theory the choice is available as the pulseaudio command line switch --resample-method but on Mint 18.3 Cinnamon nothing seems to stop pulseaudio from immediate automatic respawning when trying do this dynamically, so you'd use /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, uncomment "resample-method" and set it to "speex-float-10".

pulseaudio -k should be enough to have it respawn with the new default resampler but the combination of systemd and pulseaudio doing their utmost here both to keep me from not having to reboot and from verifying the setting to have stuck is pissing me of majorly here: no guarantees, reboot for (more) certainty.