In a continuing struggle to try to get my audio stack to work with all of my applications without issues, I have reset my entire pulseaudio configuration (purged pulseaudio and reinstalled it). Based on the recommendation of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto, I have added the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf:

I did this, replacing the line that was there because this was the model that was listed in http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt, after finding out that my audio codec was Realtek ALC883 from cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec.

For now, everything seems stable, but it always seems that way for a few days, until I find something else that doesn't work with it, or until it just breaks to bits on its own.