UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.104 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.91.867.42

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Switch on a second sound card (external, USB)
2. Visit a few pages (without any audio)
3. The USB sound card may output blank noise at maximum volume

What is the expected behavior?
No sound should come from the external sound card, Chromium only uses the internal sound card.

What went wrong?
I have 2 sound cards. Chromium outputs audio through the first (internal) card. When the second (external) card is switched on (and playing music through a music player), sometimes an action 
 in Chromium sends blank noise at maximum volume into the external sound card.

I'm sorry I can't find a way to always reproduce the problem. It has happened for many months, across multiple versions of Chromium: I've repeatedly tried Debian testing's Chromium as well as the official Chrome. Using Pulseaudio or ALSA seems to have no effect.

While I was filling in this very form, I opened a new tab. The blank noise immediately appeared. I stopped the music in the external player, closed the empty tab, then restarted the music and opened a new tab, with the same effect. Yet the third try did not trigger the loud noise. Sometimes instead of blank noise I just hear a glitch or the music is mangled until I restart it.

I suppose it's not related to playing sound but to some kind of USB action. Unfortunately I could not find any way to disable or debug this.

The USB sound card:
USB Mixer: usb_id=0x04d8feea, ctrlif=0, ctlerr=0
Card: Texas Instruments MATRIX AUDIO at usb-0000:00:12.1-2, full speed

Did this work before? Yes 

Chrome version: 59.0.3071.104  Channel: stable
OS Version: Debian 9
Flash Version: Shockwave Flash 25.0 r0