Just solved this answer thanks to this SO post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/63950990/5464805 It looks like at some point of the development my team had to exclude arm64 architectures for the app to work on simulator. The error message is not that helpfull, but removing Excluded Architectures from Build Settings worked for me. Hope this helps

I confirm this is linked to XCode simulation. When working on physical device, no crackling sound is to be reported. To keep it up this thread, @mskayyali's solution works fine: sudo pkill coreaudiod You may have to run it several times though.