So I recently bit the bullet and replaced my 2013 laptop with a new one 
(a Dell Inspiron 15 3505 with a Ryzen 3700U). In nearly every way it has 
been a massive improvement over the old laptop (four cpu cores, 16 GB of 
ram, and solid state drives meant installing the OS and booting are 
faster than I have been used to). That said, initially I'd installed the 
latest Ubuntu LTS (20.04) only to discover that neither the AMD nor 
Cirrus Logic sound were recognized. Going into the sound settings the 
output device was set to "Dummy Output." I did some searching, found 
this was apparently a not uncommon occurrence even if I'd not heard of 
it before, but none of the solutions that were suggested worked.

So, I updated the install to 21.04 at which point Ubuntu was willing to 
recognize that there was an HD Audio Controller present and I now get 
sound. Only there's a slight distortion in it that I'm not quite sure 
how to describe. A sort of ringing/crackle/echo on the high pitched 
sounds. Lowering the volume seems to help slightly but it's still 
present, and this is whether I'm using the built in speakers or 
headphones. I'm charging up a pair of bluetooth headphones I have to see 
if it's present there or if that dodges around the issue. Anyway, does 
anyone have suggestions on what might be wrong? I've done more searches 
but it seems the pages I'm finding are nearly all people talking about 
not getting any sound. I'm inclined to think it might be a driver issue 
seeing as how I'm not noticing the same distortion if I boot into Windows.

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