"Smart Sound Technology" is not in the vocabulary of my cheap computer nor the inexpensive Roku TV that I was feeding sound thru. Ironically, the visual part of the interface between cheap computer and cheap TV continues in my situation without fault, but not the sound.
And as someone else recently pointed out, the problem happened when I foolishly upgraded from Win10 to Win11, so it was definitely caused by a destructive Windows OS change imposed by Microsoft, nothing else. So, Microsoft needs to fix it, not hardware manufacturers.
I suppose that some people are getting around this problem because they have different hardware/software combinations that the demons of Redmond provided for in their creation of the Win11 Frankenstein monster but I can't imagine what multitude of people at the lower end of the economic scale have been devastated by MS' totally irresponsible approach of ignoring many computer configurations. I still suspect it was a marketing strategy to push people into buying new equipment with new software and/or pay $$$ to access MS support, which may not be any better than what you see on these web sites.