I purchased a new MBP 2019 about a year ago and had this problem right away. I've tried many things, none have gotten rid of the issue Had Apple replace speakers and audio board Reinstalled OS from scratch with no restoring of settings Killed/restarted coreaudio Reboot in safe mode, reset NVRAM, etc Upgrading to latest OS I generally always hear the crackling at some point during 5 mins of playing music, but generally if I have music through iTunes and some video through a browser, it starts crackling every 5-10 secs. Sometimes it makes video chat quite frustrating.