This doesn't help, I've done clean installs and gotten new Macs the past month (M1 Studio and M2 Macbook Pro) and both have the issue.

Only a temporary fix, sound starts crackling again after an hour or two.

I bet this has cost Apple a LOT of money that they just keep ignoring

I had the sound issue on my Intel Mac Mini 2018 as well, seems that every Mac with Apple T1 or T2 security chips has this issue.

I've been trying to make some noise, but online magazines don't think it's an issue, if you can, please spread the word.

Why isn't this being talked about, it's a HUGE issue! Why don't magazines or news outlets talk about it? What's going on!

Highly doubt they will give 2-cent on a lawsuit, it needs to hurt their image, reputation and wallet and only media attention will do that.

I tried both and now both of them work, with no audio popping or crackling (+24 hours)

I'm able to reproduce the issue, if I connect my Mac to my other Mikrotik router running (same model) and then disconnect and then play audio files locally, it will still pop and pause the music. The issue is triggered by the router and then it stays until a proper router is connected - then it's gone forever.

To verify that it's not the filled RAM; I opened 400 browser tabs and put memory pressure at 80%, not a single pop or pause.

It was also causing Plex to crash for no apparent reason on my Nvidia shield, that now no longer happens!

Can you please try with a different (MODERN) router? It's the only thing that permanently fixed this in our office for all Macs. (There is something that triggers this when any media is played over a stream and it can be any online sound, even video) When we switched out the main router, the problem disappeared forever.

Can you please try with a different (MODERN) router? It's the only thing that permanently fixed this in our office for all Macs. (There is something that triggers this when any media is played over a stream and it can be any online sound, even video) When we switched out the main router, the problem disappeared forever.

Can you please try with a different (MODERN) router? It's the only thing that permanently fixed this in our office for all Macs. (There is something that triggers this when any media is played over a stream and it can be any online sound, even video) When we switched out the main router, the problem disappeared forever.

Did you try with a different router? It's the only permanent fix that worked in our office with multiple different Macs, all with the same audio issue. It's triggered when streaming audio/video over an older router, we're able to reproduce the problem with the faulty router. Removing or closing Intel apps only makes it occur less often (like every 2-hours or so).