You are not alone. This thread about the Crackling/Popping from 2 years ago: How to Fix Cracking and Popping Sound ?. Also in the Apple Community Forums: Macbook Pro M1 16 inch popping audio. All indicates it is a software issue and Apple Support can't do anything about it. I suggest everyone reading this submit a bug report so that sometime in the next decade they will care to fix this massively annoying problem. Bug report page: Feedback - Apple.

This error is also reported in the community forums: https://origin-discussions-us.apple.com/thread/253681560 I'm getting the same error in the console when my 2021 M1 14" Macbook Pro 32GB RAM goes above ~25GB RAM usage. This error is from the coreaudiod process and libAudioStatistics.dylib library:     "HAL_client_IO_duration" = 106833;     HostApplicationDisplayID = "com.spotify.client";     cause = PageFaultsOffIOThread;     deadline = 69794966;     "input_device_source_list" = "";     "input_device_transport_list" = "";     "input_device_uid_list" = "";     "io_buffer_size" = 512;     "io_cycle" = 136317;     "io_cycle_budget" = 12358250;     "io_page_faults" = 0;     "is_prewarming" = 0;     "is_recovering" = 0;     "issue_type" = overload;     lateness = 174;     "other_page_faults" = 29;     "output_device_source_list" = "Internal Speaker";     "output_device_transport_list" = BuiltIn;     "output_device_uid_list" = BuiltInSpeakerDevice;     "safety_violation" = 0;     "sample_rate" = 44100;     "scheduler_latency" = 15497916;     "smallest_buffer_frame_size" = 512; }: (     2632814952562 ) Just milliseconds before it the Spotify process issued this console error message from the CoreAudio library: HALC_ProxyIOContext::IOWorkLoop: skipping cycle due to overload This is definitely a bug related to memory usage. I've reported it as so and linked both community and dev forum posts. I suggest everyone reading this does the same so that it will sometime in the next decade be fixed. Link to report Macbook Pro bug: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html