I know this has been 'discussed' on dev1glaxy, but I have not yet found
a solution to this problem and I've been working on it for several days
solid, although the problem behaviour is a few months old.

Background:
Since the last 2 or 3 kernel upgrades, the audio has stopped working,
unpredictably and starts working, unpredictably. It's not failing
hardware: two of the laptops fail and then resume at the same time,
side by side. If it helps, one of them (a Lenovo Thinkpad)
occasionally screams in pain. Sometimes a fix survives a reboot,
sometimes not.

I have removed, purged, reinstalled alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire,
upgraded all the firmware, reinstalled chimaera and upgrading in
sequence, installing from backports in almost every combination but the
behaviour is the same unpredictable fail/work/fail/work.

The only reliable solution that I have found for the Dell Precision
6800M is to re-format and do a clean install of chimaera. The sound
works reliably, but any upgrading to daedalus results in the
fail/work behaviour, and doesn't disappear on a subsequent upgrade to
excalibur. I have reinstalled chimaera four times in the last 36 hours

I am running a default xfce4 chimaera on the 6800M, but this is clearly
only a temporary fix. I am considering moving this host over to Xubuntu
in the hope it can find some Dell drivers, but I'd prefer to stick with
Devuan. Ideally, I'd prefer to lose pulseaudio, but as it's working
on a default install, I'm reluctant to try.

Here is the rsyslog output for the latest episode, just now:

Sep 12 13:15:34 Precision kernel: [ 8668.164009] snd_hda_intel
0000:00:1b.0: azx_get_response timeout, switching to polling mode: last cmd=0x0023a04f
Sep 12 13:15:35 Precision kernel: [ 8669.168060] snd_hda_intel
0000:00:1b.0: No response from codec, disabling MSI: last cmd=0x0023a04f
Sep 12 13:15:36 Precision kernel: [ 8670.176060] snd_hda_intel
0000:00:1b.0: azx_get_response timeout, switching to single_cmd mode: last cmd=0x0023a04f
Sep 12 13:15:36 Precision kernel: [ 8670.176229]
azx_single_wait_for_response: 6 callbacks suppressed
Sep 12 13:15:37 Precision pulseaudio[1842]: [alsa-sink-ALC3226 Analog]
alsa-mixer.c: Failed to set switch of 'Speaker': Input/output error

Any pointers would be welcome.

Best, fraser