I can confirm that this issue exists for Arma3_x64 (2.22.153995) on Fedora 44 with Proton Experimental (11.0-1) and with Pipewire (1.6.8-1). The most relevant info related to audio in my rpt logs is the following:

InitSound ...

Selected Audio Output: Speakers (PulseAudio Output) - Channels: 2, Freq: 48000

InitSound - complete

I did not see any other relevant info in the logs like errors or other audio related messages.

There was no noticeable issue like this before the update so I looked through the changelog for update 2.22. I saw "Changed: Updated to XAudio 2.9". This lead me to suspect that XAudio 2.9 behaves strangely with the current wine/proton version for some reason. I also found some useful info on the Arma 3 wiki page that talks about solutions for crackling audio when using wine/proton.

I was able to make use of a partial workaround based on the info that I mentioned above. This workaround significantly reduced the crackling sounds that I was hearing, but it did not completely eliminate all crackling sounds. I used protontricks to do the following:

1. Launch protontricks and select the Arma 3 prefix

2. Select the default wineprefix

3. Select "Install a Windows DLL or component"

4. Scroll all the way down until you see xaudio29 and then select it and hit ok

5. Protontricks will install Microsoft's xaudio2_9.dll to your prefix's system32 and syswow64 folders and it will also set the dll override automatically

6. Close protontricks and launch the game

I tested the workaround by going into the eden editor to place down a player character next to a bunch of armored vehicles. I gave the vehicles a move waypoint and then I went into the mission to compare how much crackling sound there was. Before using protontricks as described in the steps above, the crackling was terrible and very distracting as soon as I spawned in. After using protontricks, it was much better although I could still hear a little bit of crackling as the vehicles gained some distance from the player character. I might have to play around with pipewire sample rates to eliminate all crackling noises, maybe to try 44.1 kHz, but I'm not sure about that yet.