Is it possible to expand on this a bit?  It seems the problem is:

I loaded a pretrained model & weights with set parameters
I then created a new model, and attempted to load weights into it, but the parameters don’t match
So the answer would seem to be to change parameters of the state_dict()?

Per the following code example, I attempted to overwrite the first layers of the state_dict() from scratch.  However, the problem persisted.
backbone = FeatureExtractor(sample_rate, window_size, hop_size, mel_bins)

if pretrained:
        state_dict = load_state_dict_from_url(model_urls['cnn_url'])

conv1 = nn.Conv1d(1, 552, kernel_size=(1102,) ~)
weight = torch.rand(552,1,1102)
state_dict["model"]["spectrogram_extractor.stft.conv_real.weight"] = weight