Environmental audio is regularly distorted, echoey and intensely unpleasant to listen to. This is an intermittent fault.

Switching between JACK and system audio doesn't appear to consistently make a difference.

The issue is most pronounced in 1.20, 1.120.1 and snapshot 23w31a. It's also an issue for versions 1.19.3 and 1.19.4, albeit more intermittently. It does not affect 1.18.2 or earlier.

It may be an issue with directional audio processing, and I'd speculate that it might relate to the version of libopenal.so that has shipped with Minecraft recently. Here's the MD5 file hash: 293580d3c5953c6b94851c6abf4a6d5e

Disabling or enabling direction audio in the game does not affect the problem, however.

I've reproduced this on another computer running the same Linux distro (albeit with a number of other differences). Both affected systems use USB audio devices.

(Of course, now that I'm finally writing a bug report, I can't get the issue to reproduce itself, but I'll attach video as soon as it next appears.)