Sorry to interrupt the voting procedure.

This seems to be the problem.

There is a belief that problems can be solved by voting. If it does not work, we may try something else.

Can you hear ordinary music recordings without amplification?
If you feel that you really need an amplifier, you may better visit a doctor. Otherwise, very soon, you may need a much more powerful amplifier.

It has nothing to do with my sound card. The audio file was amplified with Audacity.
The strong and unpleasant noise can be easily detected on spectrograms.
You can install Audacity (sudo apt install audacity) and verify this.

Perhaps, you do not know how Audacity works. You open an audio file with Audacity. Select the whole file and amplify it. Save the result. Then you can select a time interval and build a spectrogram.

If you think that Audacity's amplifier (with default settings) is producing strong audio distortions, you can file a bug.

> mediainfo 2bit64_fragment.wav | grep Sampling -A1
Sampling rate                            : 44.1 kHz
Bit depth                                : 16 bits

Instead of fooling yourself with an oscilloscope, try to record a low level background noise (or sound) with a portable Olympus Hi-Res Audio Recorder. Then, you can amplify it with Audacity, and see (and hear) the difference.

But why do you need such a strong amplifier? Do you have problems with hearing?

Yes, you may need an amplifier, especially for high frequencies, if you have problems with hearing.

It seems to be a philosophical problem. You may find such instructions in Arch Wiki.

Perhaps, you need SLiM manual
_https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SLiM

See also
_https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/display_manager

If you have Mate Desktop, you are likely to have LightDM
_https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LightDM

cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager
/usr/sbin/lightdm

Because of sound quality.

Yes, this is the problem.
OSS4 packages (which work) have been available in Arch Linux repositories since time immemorial.
Debian developers did try to build OSS4 packages for Debian, but they always failed to work.
There were OSS4 packages in Ubuntu repositories. They did not work, but they were easy to install (and difficult to remove).
They are still OSS4 packages in Debian testing, which do not work.
On the other hand, it was not a problem for Ubuntu newbies to compile working OSS4 packages themselves.

The main problem is that an OSS4 driver for your sound card may not be available.

Perhaps, it might be more reasonable to patch Petrov's fftrate for gcc-12 and build deb packages for Devuan.
With Petrov's ALSA plugin, you can get a very good sound quality on a notebook with Intel HDA codec (motherboad).
Moreover, you can use video conferencing apps without PulseAudio. But you have to generate ~/.asoundrc with Petrov's arateconf and use apulse.

Cardinal de Richelieu asks the head of the Sécurité extérieure, during a military parade, "Sir, who are those guys in the plain suits in the parade?" "Oh," the Sécurité extérieure head answers, "they are economists, Your Eminence." And when Cardinal de Richelieu raises his eyebrows, he hastens to explain, " Just wait until we let them loose in the UK."

NOTE: The joke was found in Shumerian chronicles. Instead of economists, you can substitute any other scientists, depending on the context.

Are you going to say that imagination should be abolished to prevent suffering?

You seem to be a computer scientist. Try to imagine AI which is thinking how it got its thoughts.

Yes, I may help you to "fool yourself", as Feynman put it.

Perhaps, you are missing the point. The victims of science are not able to see the obvious simply because they are intellectual slaves.

Science is a great art, and the great scientists tend to use the same simple trick to fool naive people.
First, they let you swallow a wrong assumption, then they derive a true theory from the wrong assumption.
The best example is, perhaps, "Cargo Cult Science" of Richard Feynman _https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
If you cannot find the wrong assumption underlying Feynman's theory of scientific method, you may try to study the true Bible of Knowledge, that is, "Mambu" of Kenelm Burridge _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenelm_Burridge

If you read the Gospel of Cargo cult movement, you may notice that Cargo cultists tent to use the method of trial and error not because this method was discovered in the United States of America, but because it was invented in the Stone Age.

I also thought that is a joke, or at least a great philosophical discovery