The fix for bug 204477, which was backported to stable in 5.4.3, has unfortunately lead to another regression - nvidia hdmi audio is now highly distorted and scratchy. It also appears to be running in mono (only left channel produces any noise) and seems to either be 0% or 100% volume with nothing in between. If I revert d050d280 (the cherry-pick hash in 5.4.x stable), then everything is back to normal.
The fix is already in sound git tree. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 205855 ***