$ pavucontrol
    Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait...

$ pacmd list-cards
    Daemon not responding.

$ pactl list cards
    Connection failure: Connection refused
    pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

$ aplay -l
    **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
    -- no output for 5-7 minutes

$ sudo alsactl init
    alsa-lib main.c:761:(execute_sequence) unable to execute cset 'name='Speaker Playback Volume' 60%'
    alsa-lib main.c:2366:(set_boot_user) Unable to execute boot sequence
    Found hardware: "sof-hda-dsp" "Realtek ALC256" "HDA:8086280b,80860101,00100000 HDA:10ec0256,1d721901,00100002 cfg-dmics:2" "" ""
    Hardware is initialized using a generic method
    /usr/share/alsa/init/default:119: value write error: Input/output error

$ pulseaudio --check
    -- no output and returns exit code 0

Miscellaneous:

Playing a Youtube video: player keeps loading and says "If playback doesn't begin shortly, try restarting your device" after some time

Playing a video(that has audio) with mpv: mpv outputs the audio and video formats and is stuck after that