Welcome to the forum! Or your first post after using eos for a while 
Was this with the old iso or Atlantis?
Could you try booting in current and lts kernel?
The rest of the audio problem you describe should not be related to pipewire change on the new iso if you just updated your system from the previous August iso. To my understanding eos was still using pulseaudio, and the update would just update pulseaudio and not automatically install pipewire.
We had a couple of posts about this earlier: