M1 MacBook Pros Speakers Have a Crackling Problem

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I was having the same issue with an 2021 M1 Max 16" w/ 24-cores, only started noticing it today after a few months of otherwise unproblematic usage. Noticed it while listening to some music videos on YouTube with the internal speakers, no monitors or other peripherals connected.

I contacted Apple Support about the issue and they suggested to look for a few specific ‘.plist’ files which didn’t exist in my case (unfortunately can’t remember which ones).

But what worked for my case was:

    (Menu Bar): Go > Computer > Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences > Audio
    Delete the com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist and com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist files
    Empty trash
    Restart your computer

After this I tried listening to the same YouTube videos and Spotify and no longer had any crackling/popping so far. Was really excited that Apple's Support was able to help solve it so quickly. Hope this helps!

UPDATE (days later): Now a few days later and still not hearing the popping/crackling noises

UPDATE (2 weeks later): Still no issues!

UPDATE (4 weeks later): Still no issues. Regularly using built-in MacBook speakers, wired headphones, wireless Bluetooth headphones all without crackling.

I don't think it's a hardware problem. After a few days/weeks of uptime, coreaudiod sometimes gets into a state where, regardless of output volume, it glitches and pops periodically until you force-quit it. It's like the daemon's internal state degrades such that it's just on the edge of able to feed audio buffers to the hardware fast enough, and then all bets are off as to whether other system load will tip it over into glitching.

Things seem worse if you have and switch between multiple audio devices. I filed a Radar on this (or a very similar bug) many OS releases ago that's still open with no feedback. But "restart your computer" also solves the problem, whether or not you follow the other placebo troubleshooting nonsense.

It infrequently happens on mine. The 14" M1 is 2 months old and its speakers have cracked for an hour or so every 3 weeks. Curious to see if the problem worsens as time goes by.

Latest macos update from yesterday has something about fixing that - unsure if exactly this tho, but hope so - its somewhat annoying.

Weirdly only youtube seems to be impacted tho.