EDIT : Appreciate all the input, never did figure out what the cause was.... Somewhere in booting between two kernels it just .. stopped being a pain in the ass .... Not my favorite type of resolution

Two weeks ago, I did some updates on my nobara desktop and ever since I've had a significant delay in any audio playing.

I've been poking at it with no luck, and am just out of ideas. Logs don't show anything worrying, running pulse audio in debug looks fine, tried reinstalling packages, tried some tweaks i found online and nothing seems to work.

Rebooting into live environments from USB shows the sound working fine so decent chance the hardware is ok.

Been administrating headless *nix systems since the 90s, finally decided to try on the desktop now that I don't have to use Windows, and .. struggling with this.