First off, I am running a Dell Inspiron I3670 with a i5-9400 2.90 GHz processor and 12 GB of RAM. I am running the new Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS.

I also have an internal HDA-Intel PCH sound card.

I am having a strange problem. Whenever I launch any application that uses audio (VLC, Audacity, Youtube, et. al.) before the audio starts I get a very loud bass thump. It's like some kind of weird feedback. Any idea how I might eliminate this?