On my Fedora box I experienced some crackling sound / distortion when playing games. All other applications seemed to work fine. The following tip by heftig helped:
Try adding tsched=0 to the load-module module-udev-detect line in /etc/pulse/default.pa so it reads:
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0
After rebooting the problem was gone.
Had the same problem. However, the fix for me was setting tsched=1 as it was 0 already. So – flip and try, may work. :)