I have been hearing audio crackling under a couple different conditions: When RAM usage is high. I usually experience this when a heavy YouTube livestream is open in a Microsoft Edge tab, or generally when many tabs are active. All audio playback is affected: YouTube videos in Edge/Safari, Spotify, local audio files, etc. The crackling occurs though the laptop speakers, Bluetooth earbuds, and through an audio interface, though with the latter two it sounds less like a crackle and more like a brief stutter/click during audio playback. No idea if RAM is the actual cause, but the observation is that when the crackling does occur, RAM usage is usually up there (memory pressure in the yellow or upper green region). When my digital audio workstation, FL Studio, is running. Interestingly, RAM usage does not have to be high for crackling to happen when listening to sources outside of the DAW. Audio within FL Studio, however, sounds generally wonderful and free of crackles. My guess (as a layman in this area) is that FL Studio hogs most of the audio buffer — as it rightfully should, to keep music production free of interruptions. The same behaviour seems to happen with Ableton Live 11 Lite, though I haven't used it as much as FL Studio. System: 14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16 GB RAM. Changing the sample rate in Audio MIDI Setup doesn't seem to work, and if anything worsens the crackling. I have not tried disabling the Core Audio service and don't intend to — I don't completely understand what the consequences of doing so might be, and anyway it sounds like only a temporary fix. @tmikaeld's post looks like an interesting update to this topic. Since I don't have another router handy, I might do some tests at a coffee shop?

@mnovaes Thanks for sharing this! Looks promising, I am crossing my fingers and knocking on wood that our ears can be at peace once this update rolls out :)