Squeaks from the speaker

Some media, in particular speech, produces audible squeaks. I’m running NixOS (with a Framework 16-specific configuration provided by the nixos-hardware project), and I have enabled the Linux audio compatibility setting in the firmware settings, but only after having already booted NixOS once. I hadn’t noticed this until just an hour ago; whether that was by luck or due to some change I cannot say.

This isn’t about the audio quality in general, that’s serviceable, albeit with room for improvement.

Does anybody know if

  • this is likely a hardware fault?
  • there is a workaround?