Solved
Apex Legends S21 - 5.1 surround sound silent directly ahead
Product: Apex Legends Platform:Steam-PC Please specify your platform model. PC AMD or Nvidia Model Number AMD RX 6700 XT Enter RAM memory size in GB 32 What is your gamertag/PSN ID/EA Account n...
UPDATE: I copied over and played the Wattson+Pipewire recording on Windows 10 and it sounds normal. Playing the same video on Linux shows the silent center channel. There is something wrong with center speaker output on Linux and all the audio controls seem to be fine. I'll have to try older kernels or versions of snd_hda_intel to see if it goes away and check with the maintainer. The cause isn't Apex or Proton.
CONCLUSION: I needed to enable override for the 7.1 side channel in hda-jack-retask to 'not connected'. Everything worked as expected after that. I must have messed with the settings and disabled the override a little while ago. It causes the channels to be scrambled a bit when it is not overridden to be 'not connected'.
