See the task T347776: Phonos doesn't play in the Reference Tooltips gadget's popups. Different reference popup affordances can decide by themselves what to do with the audio not playing in-place in a popup, so this is the task dedicated to fixing this specifically in Reference Previews.

Steps to replicate the issue

• Have the Reference Previews beta feature enabled
• Open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Homme
• Hover over [1]
• Click to play the media

What happens?:
A page with an audio opens and then the audio plays.

What should have happened instead?:
The audio should play in place.

See also the technical details in that task.