OS Catalina sound issue

I recovered my old 2012 MacBook Pro recently when the disk died and after installing OS Catalina it now has an odd issue where during usage the internal speaker stops working randomly after a while every time it is in use.

It works again after a reboot but nothing else seems to help with the issue and the laptop works perfectly fine otherwise. When it happens it affects all apps such as Safari, Quicktime, Spotify and VLC that use the internal speaker but will play sound through headphones or to external speakers like a Sonos Beam.

Restarting constantly is incredibly frustrating especially when it happens in the middle of playing films or music. Has anyone come across this before and found a fix in the past, resetting the NVRAM has not helped unfortunately?