Still present in the 21.10 daily build. The "fix" is to kill the process and uninstall the package.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1033405/crackling-and-delayed-sound- after-upgrading-to-18-04 killall speech-dispatcher sudo apt-get remove speech-dispatcher -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1739310 Title: Sound crackling in Ubuntu 16.04 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/speech-dispatcher/+bug/1739310/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs