Sound management seems to be broken.

Hello, I have been having problems related to my Plasma 25 install on multiple levels. 1. Sound is unclear and there is a lot of noise. I also hear random crackle/blip from time to time. There a blip I hear when I connect my earphones. This all seems like a hardware problem to me. Possibly the speakers on my 2 month old system have give up. I tried older ISO to see if it is a software problem but it occurs on older version of Fedora and Ubuntu too. That being said the biggest problem is software based. 2. The earphone detection is broken. It has a mind of its own. It may or may not recognize my earphone. I have to either kill pulseaudio or restart session to get sound. 3. Audio settings tell me there are three recording devices on my system - Internal Microphone, Microphone, and Headphone Microphone. The first and last one makes sense but not the Microphone. Which device is it? Do you guys have similar experiences or ideas on how to fix it?