FWIW, I'm on archlinux but experience the same issue (and I did so back when I used ubuntu).
I thought I'd share that I could fix the crackling noise by disabling realtime scheduling. Here's my daemon.conf which produces fine sound:
$ cat ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf default-sample-rate = 48000 alternate-sample-rate = 44100 default-sample-format = s16le realtime-scheduling = no
FWIW, I'm on archlinux but experience the same issue (and I did so back when I used ubuntu).
I thought I'd share that I could fix the crackling noise by disabling realtime scheduling. Here's my daemon.conf which produces fine sound:
$ cat ~/.config/ pulse/daemon. conf sample- rate = 44100 sample- format = s16le
default-sample-rate = 48000
alternate-
default-
realtime-scheduling = no