Continuing the hunt. I think I can exclude tlp as a potential culprit now. Checked its config against the manual and your config printed above; only minor diffs. Then disabled tlp according to the tlp Troubleshooting Guide (TLP_ENABLE=0, reboot). No change, same flawed behavior.
This causes me to look into the Xfce Power Manager now. Will report back...
Actually, one more check in between. I let Audacious do its output via pulseaudio instead of direct to alsa. In this case, Xfce Power Manager blanks the screen after the desired idle time, and sound vanishes just a few seconds later (both for USB-DACs and internal sound card). Audacious stays running as a program, but track replay gets paused. When I wake the laptop up, Audacious continues playing from where it stopped.
In the case of direct alsa output, replay would continue until the next track change with samplerate switching, causing alsa to throw the a.m. errors.
Anyway, Xfce is the next target in my hunt.
Finally I got it resolved. At hindsight, the above feels a bit like a newb...
The root cause is how Manjaro Xfce is set up out of the box. Iām NOT saying it should be different! It works marvelously, but it brings along the peculiarities of the software chosen by the Manjaro devs.
In short: Xfce Power Management is set up fine and works fine. As installed by the 18.0.4 ISO, it uses light-locker to lock the screen whenever required. By default, screen blanking is such an event, as well as the other screen power events.
light-locker by design (feature or bug?) takes the audio down! This is not well documented, but it has been the source of lots of discussions. E.g. cf. https://xubuntu.org/news/screen-locking-in-xubuntu-14-04/.
Sigh...
Thus, the workaround for my use case - listening to music on headphones in a quiet dark room and not accepting to have the laptop screen disturb me - is to switch off screen locking by light-locker in the Xfce Power Manager. This workaround is not so nice for other use cases like using the computer as a jukebox for a party, where you want the screen to be dark, but you also want the computer locked to prevent other guests messing with it.
@Mr_Glitch, thanks for coming in ever so often.
I edit the thread title to also mention light-locker.
I'm happy you found resolve 
I completely forgot about xfce screen locker. It has settings for power. Sometimes I'm such a dumb 
If you want to use something different to lock screen you can use betterlockscreen | AUR. Is very nice. I'm using it all the time Can be used with suspend if you add betterlockscreen@.service. So, when you in home and don't need locking screen just disable service
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