Ok, so....I had noticed something when playing videos from cmdline, the video and the audio would be detected to be out of sync and the player would try many times to get back in sync.
As mentioned above, I did upgrade/update including kernel, but I also made changes to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf based on a recomendation in Arch Linux:
default-sample-rate= 44100
alternate-sample-rate=48000
default-fragment-size-msec =5
It's been most of three days and nothing has triggered anything odd. Tentatively think I'll call it solved.