How to Fix Cracking and Popping Sound ?

Same issue here - super annoying. Reboot seems to help but always come back

Same problem here. Constant crackling across all audio source, particularly the Apple Music app. I don't have bluetooth on and I don't have the Teams audio driver loaded.

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro/M1 Max running Monterey 12.4.

Please report this issue in feedback, this is one of the few that Apple has reached back out to me on. If they do, they will provide a method to log with ktrace and a few other things so they can look into it. Based on this it is definitely a known issue.

If you want a guaranteed way to trigger the crackling and popping, run a VM on the system. Especially a mac VM using the apple virtualization since that is 100% apple, but any should suffice. Or obviously a high cpu/gpu load for a while. Then exit the VM, just running it will start the problem and make it highly likely any cpu use will cause lots of popping, until you reboot.

My guess is it is a driver that causes a buffer to go nuts, as killing everything related to sound at a user level does not work, so it has to be something kernel level or something similar. Pay attention to the popping, many times it will be audio going out of sync and back into sync in time. Very obvious with youtube videos where it will glitch and sound like someone said something twice.

I was also asked to test the noise with playing "silent" audio. It never happens with silent which really makes me sure it is a buffer repeating/desync/catchup issue as a silent audio would not produce anything that would generate a desync, or you wouldn't notice it anyway.

BTW the teams driver may be AN issue, but it is not the cause. It is easy to generate with or without it installed, especially using the VM method above.

Same problem. So annoying if you listen music, watching youtube, when you make business calls and etc

Just FYI, I wiped my mac on Thursday (3 days ago) and had no distortions since. Started as fresh as I possibly could. Made a list of all apps installed and reinstalled most of them manually one by one. Only synced the keychain to my iCloud. The rest of the files (like .ssh folder, projects folder, save states for openemu, etc) were restored by manually copying them from my latest TM backup.

Today had to load the system memory heavily by running lots of docker containers and no distortions appeared (when in the past they would appear just before memory pressure turned orange).

I still suspect that this bug is somehow related to unsuccessful software (config/driver) migration from Intel to Apple silicon.

Will let you know if the distortions come back (fingers crossed they won't :)!

MacBook Pro 16-inch 2021 (MacBookPro18,1), M1 Pro chip OS 12.4 16GB RAM

Crackling occurs streaming video (Youtube, you name it, etc), listening to Music.app, in Google Meet, via headphones, onboard speakers, and connected audio a hardware interface (Presonus Audiobox iTwo) for music production. It DOES NOT occur with playback via AirPlay so seems related directly to M1 hardware. Tried an alternate OS account (same issue) but have not revived or restored the firmware via DFU. Seems from the amount of replies here that this is a much bigger issue. Hoping Apple will fix soon as it is completely aggravating.

Same issue. Just deleted MS teams driver. Hope it'll work, but still i need MS teams for work and not sure if i can use it without driver.

Same issue, macbook pro 2021, 16", Mac OS Monterey then Ventura. Ms teams installed, but crackings persists even when Teams is not launched

I'm experiencing the same annoying issue with macOS Monterey 12.2.1 on MacBook Pro 14'', 2021. Apple, please solve this.

Also happens when no Intel apps or kexts are running at all.

HALC_ProxyIOContext::IOWorkLoop: failed to send the final message to the server, Error: 0x10000003

HALC_ProxyIOContext::IOWorkLoop: skipping cycle due to overload

Problem occurs more often USB 3.X devices rather than USB 2.0, switching between them gives instant pops on one but not the other.

Have the same problem with my macbook pro 14" 2021 on 12.3.1

I place all my hopes in the arrival of the next version of macOS... Do some of you have installed the beta version of macOS Ventura ?

Same issue on a 1 month old macbook pro 14 2021. Glad I found this thread before it was too late.

Immediately returning mine to Costco for a refund. I won't be purchasing anything else Apple for me or my family, or recommending to friends, until this is fixed.

I found this solution:

What helped for me was using the following commands in your terminal:

sudo killall coreaudiod

and after that one copy and paste the complete sentence below:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.audio.coreaudiod && sudo launchctl start com.apple.audio.coreau

What's everyone feed back after last Monterey update ? Monterey 12.5 (21G72)