Hey there, just posting my experience too. I've had my 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro since February of 2020. Today, for the first time ever, I've experienced this awful crackling, distorted audio while following along to a Udemy React Native tutorial. I'm currently on v11.1 of macOS Big Sur and these are my specs: 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 AMD Radeon Pro 5300M 4 GB The following applications were open: Visual Studio Code v1.52.1 XCode's iPhone 12 Pro Max iOS 14.4 Simulator v12.4 (940.20) SimulatorKit 597.13.0.1 CoreSimulator 732.18.6 Brave v1.19.88 Chromium: 88.0.4324.96 (Official Build) (x86_64) One tab running my React Native expo browser dev tools on http://localhost:19002/ A second tab running the Udemy course I tried to kill the coreaudio process as suggested in https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/132423?answerId=656040022#656040022 but that did not resolve this concerning issue. I didn't seem to have this issue on my former 15-inch MacBook Pro which was on Mojave. At the time, I could run Android Studio's Android Simulator and XCode's iPhone simulator without any issues, so I'm assuming this is just an OS flaw that apparently has made its away into Big Sur from Catalina unfixed somehow. This is completely unacceptable. I can get by in the meantime by using my iPad Pro to watch the Udemy course so that I dedicate my system resources to just the simulator(s) and Visual Studio Code, but I really think a "Pro machine" shouldn't be having this issue.