How to Fix Cracking and Popping Sound ?

More of the same, apple promises a solution, to crackling speakers, when I spoke with senior adviser few weeks ago they said the engineering dept is aware of the problem and to give it a week, here we are few weeks later, still no fix, we currently have 44 2019 16” MacBook pros in our office, out of the 44 units 7 of them have speakers that pop and crackle, making them not usable for conferencing and teams / zoom / etc, video play back, music files are also distorted, apple is aware of the problem, yet they do nothing, software update isn’t going to fix problem, there is a short on the logic boards Problem seems to be the right speaker that fails, atkeast in all of ours since speakers are glued in, can’t just swap them out, we replaced the top cause on one of them, brand new speakers, keyboard battery touchbar etc. surprise it didn’t help fix the issue, waisted $400 for a repair that was never going to work, we also have 5 units that have sleep wake issue, close the lid or let MacBook sleep, and they crash, apple is also aware of this issue but once again do nothing.

please release a repair program for thiese issue, on the 2019 16”inwould hate to go back to windows or chrome books, but as a business owner can’t afford to replace $3000 MacBooks after only a year or 2 of use, we went with the 16” pro because staingate and keyboard issues were resolved, in this model although they still get staingate but it’s not as bad as the 2014 models main issue is the known crap logicboard apple refuses to fix

Just experienced this crackling yesterday, and I tried all the solutions I saw online. It was only until I removed apps like Mac Keeper and such that the sound disappeared, I'm not too sure if it's permanently gone but we shall see.

It's really really really bothering me now!! I don't seem to get the crackles much now, it seems like coreaudiod is auto resetting itself though. It's extra annoying because every time this happens (probably every 10 minutes or even less) my volume level resets to a very low volume. It's making this £2300 machine practically useless for my day to day work!!!!!!

Apple, we pay you big money for your products so we don't have to deal with these insanely stupid bugs. It was first reported 2 YEARS ago for goodness sake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everyone should submit bug feedback here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html

Couldn't we imagine a command that lists our installed applications and that we would share to see if there are obvious similarities ? I know, it's lame... but I don't have any more ideas so that this problem doesn't end up driving me crazy!

We must have some common points ! since it's been happening to people for several years (and it doesn't happen to everyone)

This worked for me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGD9sd_sih4

Mine was still cracking and popping on 48,000 Hz, so I knocked it down to 44,100 Hz and working fine so far.

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?

Adding my name to the list. This issue just started happening to my MacBook Air M1. I've tried all the fixes listed in all 19 pages of this thread and none of them have stopped it for more than a few minutes. Any set of headphones I plug into my headphone jack "click" every second or so intermittently while doing anything audio such as streaming youtube, using Unity3D, Unreal Engine or Ableton 11. It is literally maddening to the point where I am going to hook up my old PC to get work done.

Model Name: MacBook Air

Model Identifier: MacBookAir10,1

Chip: Apple M1

Total Number of Cores: 8 (4 performance and 4 efficiency)

Memory: 16 GB

System Firmware Version: 7459.141.1

OS: macOS Monterey 12.5

I'm using MBP M1 Pro 14" 16GB RAM. I'm having an Cayin RU6 external DAC connecting to my MBP and I'm also experiencing sound crackling. The issue happens more frequently when the system is in high memory & CPU usage BUT the issue is gone if I use the internal DAC under the same circumstance. So there is something wrong with the way the system communicates with the external DAC.

I also tried installing Parallel Desktop and play music in Windows 11 but the sound crackling still existed with the external DAC, but not with the internal DAC. So I think it's not an issue with MacOS software as the issue occurs on both OS.

Same issue, really about time Apple fixed this, ridiculous

@mickycheemly Thanks for letting us know that 32GB of RAM doesn't help.

I'm curious if that problem applies to all M1 macbooks as I just bought new one and have no issues with sound, should I expect those appear in some circumstances? I still can return it, but for now only because of speakers are too bassy for my taste.

Anyone knows solution for this? I have the MB Pro 14 M1 and having the same issue on MacOS 12.4. Using internal speakers. Using external speakers doesn't have cracking sound at all.

OK I tested with my audio interface MOTU M2 and glitches are ubearable! Nothing like that happens neither on my old 2014 macbook pro nor windows PC! I'm returning it :(

I am experiencing the same issue with a 2021 M1 Macbook Pro running MacOS 12.4. Does anyone know of a definitive fix or are we at the mercy of Apple?