I was able to fix the issue on my side. The problem (for my situation) was a conflict between pulseaudio and pipewire as both were running on my system at the same time and pipewire-pulse.service was masked.... meaning the sound was not going through pipewire.
The way to test that (as a user not root): systemctl --user restart pipewire-pulse.service Failed to restart pipewire-pulse.service: Unit pipewire-pulse.service is masked. I resolved the issue by uninstalling pulseaudio, rebooting and then doing a correct migration to pipewire as described in the debian wiki here: https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire I ended up with pipewire, pipewire-pulse, pipewire-alsa and pipewire-jack installed and pulseaudio not installed. After that the sound is working fine. I am able to upgrade to wireplumber 0.4.12-1 and everything works as it should.
