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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