I was haunted by this bug for several years, yet I was not able to google the solution, because I am not a native English speaker and I did not know the English world "crackling" (shame on me) and I was not able to describe the sound degradation properly to Google.
Today I was inspecting the processes on my system and I was suspicious, because of the speech dispatcher processes: I thought they were malware, because I don't want nor need any speech synthesis on my system, so I was wondering why they run under my account. Solved this by uncommenting DisableAutoSpawn in /etc/speech- dispatcher/speechd.conf -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1739310 Title: Sound crackling in Ubuntu 16.04 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/speech-dispatcher/+bug/1739310/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs