I don’t feel like turning off every app apart from the one making sound is viable, and frankly it shouldn’t be necessary. I haven’t had to do that in 20 years of having computers. Until now. Apple finally replaced my M1 MacBook Pro after verifying the crackling sound in spite of not being able to diagnose the fault. And then I switched on the replacement and no pops, no crackles… I start to relax, celebrate even… and then pop 💥 it’s back 🤦🏼‍♂️

Same issues here on my 1 month old MacBook Pro 16” 1TB 16GB ram with latest Monterrey installed. It went to Apple Store for a fix but they couldn’t reproduce the intermittent issue so returned it to me unfixed. I then tried keeping a note of the time stamps of all the crackles and doing a full data dump to Apple Support but they found no issues within the data (I.e, they say must be hardware and not a software thing, but also that it’s weird because hardware normally just breaks and this is intermittent”. They’ve booked me another Genius appointment for today but I’m not holding my breath that the crackling will happen while I am there 🤦🏼‍♂️.