All audio stops when pwvucontrol is opened

[GideonWolfe]

On my system, all sounds generally work fine except for when I open pwvucontrol, which causes all sounds playing across my system to stop, while the playing media continues silently.

I have a desktop plugged into the dongle for the Steelseries Arcis 7, which is plugged into a pair of desktop speakers. My System sees the game/chat output all the time, and sound will be routed to the headphones/speakers depending on if the headset is powered on. I've been using this same hardware setup with Arch linux for years, so I know it can work.

Here is what my patch bay looks like when play spotify without pwvucontrol open (cava and scope-tui are visualizers)

and here is what it looks like after I open pwvucontrol

When I close pwvucontrol, audio resumes after a few seconds.

What do I need to tweak to make pwvucontrol not mute all my system audio?

[phisch]

I experience the exact same issue, but for pavucontrol, which is why I switched to pwvucontrol, where it doesn't happen. So this might be ralated to something else?

[GideonWolfe]

Interesting. I don't think I had that problem when I was using pavucontrol, and I swear *pwvucontrol` used to work just fine