Audio issues on linux (popping)

[mild basin]

I have this very strange issue on my computer where my speakers, headphones, iems, or any audio medium for that matter starts to make a popping sound whenever no sound is playing in the operating system, despite not having any issues at all on windows when it comes to this. the popping is very loud and can only be controlled by the physical volume wheel of whatever device I am using, and the software side volume just does not seem to matter, this eventually happens on basically every linux distro I try, it is kind of inconsistent when the popping sound starts to happen, but once it does it never stops unless I play something.

[bright rivet]

I used to get it for a while in the past. Hasn't happened for a long time.
Are you using pipewire?

[mild basin]

yeah

[bright rivet]

wireplumber?

[mild basin]

I've tried both pipewire and pulseaudio on a clean install and it doesn't matter

[bright rivet]

Strange that it happens in different distros.
Firmware issue maybe?

[mild basin]

yeah I thought

I'll get a dongle so it works as a dac and maybe that fixes it but for now I wanna rule out everything else

[bright rivet]

Did you search for issues relating to your sound card?

[mild basin]

not really

let me do that actually

though long story short it's a really old hp compaq I like playing around with on linux