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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I use an external DAC and encounter this crackling problem regularly. I have to unplug/replug my DAC to get it to go back to normal. I just thought it was a hardware problem with my DAC because it’s getting up there in the years, thought the caps might be going. Hmm…

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I have 4 external all different sound cards and AMPs (USB), it's the same on all of them.

There is no software remedy, only re-connecting physically works (temporarily)

Well dang. I have had intention on buying a new DAC largely due to the issue; for better or worse there goes that plan.

I haven't tried Apple "certified" Thunderbolt devices yet, but others in the huge Apple thread [0] has and still experience cracks/pops.

I also didn't realize that this problem was common, but I switched to using an optical toslink cable to an external DAC which seems to have fixed it for me. Although now the system volume control doesn't work, but I can work around that with the volume control on my amp.

soundsource gives you the feature to control an external dac with the system volume. I bought it specifically for this use case.

This is not a perfect solution, but if it's possible - see if the apps in question have an option for 'exclusive control' over the audio device.

If they do, then the app in question will pass the audio raw to the external device without the OS or any existing mixers interfering at all.

Of course, no other audio will play - only that from the app with exclusive control. It's not perfect but it can help in these scenarios.

“Amp” isn't an acronym

I had an external audio interface with occasional horrible bursts of white noise. I assumed it was the CPU not being fast enough, because there was a correlation between work and the bursts… but in the end it was a power supply that wasn’t powerful enough for all my hardware (although everything worked). I changed it, and the issue went away.

Sometimes happens on Windows and Linux, too. Could be a bug in the XMOS SDK, seeing how almost all audio interfaces use it.

TIL! So far I'd been thinking that it was maybe an issue with my headphones (Bose QC45, connecting to the MBA M1)

I wonder if the clock source is getting out of whack with the DACs, it could be caused by extreme jitter.

Had crackling with slowdowns and kernel panics on M1.

Was fixed with a motherboard swap

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