pavucontrol stuck at "Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait..."

This solve the same problem with my:

pulseaudio --check
pulseaudio -D

Taken from: [Solved] Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait ... https://classicforum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=27044.0

I've had this issue since upgrading to 18.04 and read almost all there is about to read about it. I fiddled with the settings, the packages, and eventually it would work sometimes, after installing PulseEffects for getting the right channel throughput for the audio. But then when I would change the audio-output channel to say headphones instead of speakers, the gnome shell crashed. This crash gave me insight to some "obsolete packages" that were still installed and needed removing or upgrading.

So in summary, running these commands solved all my audio problems after a few weeks of debugging (so stupid if you see it now, but whatever works right?)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio pavucontrol
sudo alsa force-reload
reboot

Then

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mikhailnov/pulseeffects
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pulseeffects

After a final resetting of the audio output channel, it worked like a charm again.