I was getting random crackling sounds while playing certain Youtube videos in Chrome, especially in Theater or fullscreen mode.

Symptoms and other observations:

  • crackling sounds are random and they occur only in some videos
  • it's super-annoying
  • only Chrome is affected (Firefox and Edge are both fine)
  • it happens only with Youtube videos (VLC or Jellyfin playback is fine, for example)
  • when hardware acceleration is disabled in Chrome settings, the problem goes away

What did not help:

Solution:

For me, the right solution was to change the graphics backend that Chrome uses (from Direct3D to OpenGL).

How to do it:

  1. navigate to chrome://flags
  2. search for "graphics backend"
  3. select OpenGL from the Choose ANGLE graphics backend list of options
  4. finally enjoy a clean sound without cracklings!