CoreAudio in Tahoe seems to have a bug… Not a first time, but previously such mostly happened on Intel silicon macOS after Apple released their own silicon.
Every second output device start seems end up messed up, doesn’t happen with the macOS 15.7 they released at the same time. I’m trying to figure a workaround.
If you have “Idle time” in HQPlayer set to 30 or 60 seconds and you use fixed output format, then it would be rather rare encounter.