There is a cracking/popping sound when I play music/video using the mbp speakers, and jump to next song/video

Thanks for the update but you're saying a lot of THEY SAID and THEY SAID. This can only be taken with a grain of salt since there's no facts to back that up. Like I said not all of us are having this issue anymore. My popping sound is now gone after the recent update. Since you now appear to have gotten your refund you may either look for a different Mac or look into Windows options.

LOL! I can only offer what Senior AppleCare advisors are saying to me on the phone. We went through multiple steps, I was on the phone for nearly 2 hours with them. It's a shame as the machine is exactly what I want and I have had MacBook Pro's for 10+ years now.

"LOL! I can only offer what Senior AppleCare advisors are saying to me on the phone."

I'm not telling you not to believe them. I'm saying that as a forum you're saying what THEY SAID but there's no facts or proof of the conversation you had with Apple. Until there's a public statement of hardware defects then a conversation you had on the phone with Apple cannot be used as influence here since there's no way to verify this. There's always a chance there were some models that were shipped out with defects but this is in no way a widespread hardware issue especially since I and few others here have stated our machines are no longer popping in sound after the update.

I'm certain you will find you a nice machine be it a different Mac or a Windows machine to satisfy your computing needs. Good luck.

I must have misread your post. I thought you were stating that you were getting a refund.? My mistake. My advice honestly for you would be to request a refund if that is possible. After 4 machines it's best to let this model go. I can't guarantee any further success for you. It certainly wouldn't take 4 machines for me to be convinced to move on. After the second machine I would've gotten a refund. I bought my 16" MBP in late January. I immediately noticed the popping sound from reading about it. Since Catalina and the 16" were new at the time I gave it a couple of software updates. Things happen. Not sure why after 4 machines the latest update didn't fix your machine. Perhaps different parts? Apple does resource their parts from different vendors.

Staying on Mac you may want to try an iMac if you need the power of the MacBook Pro, or an older 2019 15" MBP. If those aren't suitable then take a look at the Dell XPS and while I don't care for this other model you may try the Lenovo X1Extreme 2 or the Razerblade laptop.

Well that's unfortunate for you. After the the 10.15.4 update I haven't experienced anymore popping sound. I've seen the same great experience with a lot of people on Reddit as well. It may have something to do with your setup or possibly corrupt software files installed.

Who are you referring to DPJ? Who is trying to downplay? No one here has done anything except represent their personal experiences and have stuck to that. Please point out where the "downplay" was occurring.

You can shake your head all the time, but it is very poor of Apple to have an issue going on for this long. The engineering team have taken logs from my machine, and have confirmed it is a known issue and HAS NOT been fixed! Whether you like what I am saying or not, it is the truth, and 5 machines later is a joke!

Hi Nicholas, It's unfortunate we don't get any official word from Apple, at least, I haven't seen it, but I installed 10.15.5 the other day and think it's fixed. I need a few weeks to do various testing.

I'd go for the update. See how it works out for you and let us know.

Thanks!

-Vincent

I experienced this for the first time on 10.5.5, changing the MIDI frequency didn't help. It keeps making a random noise even while I'm not doing anything. At first, I thought it was a fan problem but it gets much worse when I'm actually playing audio. Muting the system audio is the only way I can get it to be silent, but that's not practical.

Dear Apple, is this ever going to be fixed? Throughout the whole week while having online meetings I had a regularly recurring popping sounds with the built-in speaker. I have it in Microsoft Teams and have while listening to music in Spotify. If I restart the machine they go away but simply plugging in an external speaker (via jack plug) can break the system again and the popping/breaking sound comes back to the internal speaker (external speakers unplugged).

I have the same issue. I made a video showing what's up. https://youtu.be/0-be20m4lGU

Apple, can we get a comment? Will this be patchable? Otherwise is going back to the apple store.

More discussion occurring in this thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250867287

I have this issue also. I have the base model 16" with cracking in the speakers when closing or switching Youtube videos and when closing the Pandora website.

I wiped my entire system, repartitioned a new volume, and installed the latest MacOs Catalina and tried to reproduce the popping sound. 100% producible.

I’m going to initiate a return tomorrow.

can I ask where is that console? Id like to see these errors please