Macbook pro 16" M1 pro 2021 popping sound OS 12.0.1

Just adding to the convo to help keep people updated

16 inch M1 Pro MBP - late 2021

Was crackling SUPER bad for the first 4 months or so, gradually got better, eventually forgot I had the issue at all. Just caught a couple of pops today and it reminded me, so I googled around to see how many others it was affecting.

I'm sure an OS update fixed it for the most part.

It's driving me crazy. The popping is still a thing in 2023. I'm just trying to enjoy some music while doing my work. The dozens of cracking per song completely ruins any good faith or mood for the day. Apple's audio performance is a complete dumpster fire at this point. Quality is no longer a concern for Apple anymore. I'm using a high quality external DAC and even like that I still can't avoid the mind boggling popping.

Apple better advertise this as a feature called "i-Popping" Otherwise I don't see how they can explain for such a horrible user experience. Back in the days, it was iPod that made Apple famous. They're about to revolutionize audio again with i-Popping in 2023.

A pattern I've noticed is that the poppings seem to be related to RAM or system load because it sometimes happens right after I've clicked the mouse, trackpad, or given any type of user input to the computer. Dragging a chrome window around can cause a popping or several popping sounds in a row. Right after starting to play a YouTube video is an almost guaranteed several popping sounds in a row. Right after Apple music switching the song is an almost guaranteed several popping sounds in a row. etc.

I'm using a M1 Max 16-inch pro 32GB - Monterey Version 12.4 (21F79)

I have the same problem with the sound. I also saw a pattern related to RAM, I have a MacBook pro m1 pro with 16 GB of RAM, and when the RAM passes 13.8gb (+/-) of use, it starts popping. It's a shame to have these kinds of problems, which don't seem to have a solution.

The only "solution" is to activate quicktime player and open a new audio recording, then the pops and cracks disappear, shame for apple, they had to fix this software issue a long time ago. This is a low-level driver or a kernel bug, they have to step up the quality of their kernel C++, C coders. (yes macOS kernel is written in CPP).

While on a vacation, I've sent my macbook 16" M1 away for service to address this issue. And of course, they 'did not find anything' and returned it. BUT, they did install Ventura 13.2.1 (22D68), and although I am just a day in, the popping sound has not appeared yet.

I'm very sure it's a software issue, and this update might have fixed it, or at least minimized the bug. But I will have to try a little longer to be sure. Normally the popping sound would have occurred already, but I have to take into account that this is a fresh install and I haven't got all my apps installed yet.

Good news so far - of all suggested fixes, I suggest you update to 13.2.1 as the most highly probable fix.

I have recently updated to Ventura 13.2.1 and the popping has reduced significantly. It does still happen when the cpu and ram are stressed. When it’s not doing much, I basically don’t hear it. It has made my m1 Mac Pro at least usable again

I've installed eqMac and it still happens to me. The installation doesn't seem to have replaced coreaudio though, which I thought it would if it's a separate audio driver. I could have installed it wrong though.

The most interesting thing I've found though, eqMac has a button to reset audio engine. When I press that button, I hear the exact same blip sound as I do without eqMac installed. I looked at the core audio process in Activity Monitor and pressing the button in eqMac seems to kill the coreaudio process and recreate it.

Given the above finding, I have a feeling that coreaudio is actually crashing on our machines and re-creating itself. The sound is exactly the same. Not sure what is causing it to crash yet though.

Unfortunately the problem re-occurred. Minimal, but still. I'm now trying the eqMac solution as suggested below by alexggggggg and will let you guys know. A proper sound driver sounds like the right way to fix this problem (pun not intended).

I've been running the Console app for a few hours now, looking at Errors and Faults when the popping sound occurs. I'm pretty sure I've found what the problem is.

The bluetoothd process reports the following exactly 12 times, each time I hear the popping sound.

A2DP packet flushed: L2CAP (chip) flush occured. Current sequence=22109, timestamp=4132734

This tells me that it's actually a bluetooth driver issue, not a core audio driver issue.

I see these logs posted 12 times without fail. If it's flushing packets, I can only assume it's not sending them for this short time period.

[Link Edited by Moderator]


That's weird. Don't you think the described process is just taking up memory to run and therefor creating the popping sound? Because if that's the case, bluetooth (driver) itself is not the problem, just an event connected to the cause.

Is disabling bluetooth for the time being helpful in validating your theory?

I used the internal speakers for a few hours and didn't hear the popping sound. I also didn't see any packed flush error messages in the console program for bluetoothd.

The second I start using my headphones again I see the errors and hear the popping sound.

All I did to test the success case was disable handoff and AirPlay receiver. With these disabled though I still hear it using my bluetooth headphones.

If you google Introducing Bluetooth® LE Audio you can learn about L2CAP and when it flushes. I don't have the time to investigate right now but maybe someone else does. It could be that the firmware for the bluetooth hardware chip (being BCM4387) needs to be updated somehow. I can't see a firmware version online at the moment but the firmware version I have is: 20.1.501.6742

The eqMac driver installation seems to have done the trick for me. I have not experienced a popping sound after it.

eqmac.app

Maybe it doesnt work for everyone, but it worked for me as wel as for alexggggg.

MBP 2021 M1 16" 16Gb same problem even with the most recent (at this moment) update Ventura 13.3.

Deleting plist files or restarting audio services doesn't help. RAM usage doesn't seems to be impacting since I even hear that noise when the laptop is starting up.

Hi all. I did reply in a previews post saying that changing it to 44 hz fixed the issue. However it did not. Instead kept getting the popping before and after notification sounds. The popping seems to have been getting louder. I thought was a hardware issue but found out its a software issue. I installed the eqMac app, a few people mentioed using this and fixed the issue. NO MORE POPPING. Also wanted to mention that im using the latest update 13.0.1. You would have thought apple would have fixed this issue by now. I cant remember ever having this issue when the M1 max was brand new. It seems to have developed over time and gets louder and launder. But for a fix for now install eqMac app. After install no config is required, just let it sit in the background. If the issue comes back with eqMac app installed, I will let everyone know.

I know exactly what is going on here and I doubt there's anything we can do to fix it on our end.

Previously I reported logs that I saw from bluetoothd saying that there was a buffer flush. This seemed to occur at the exact same time as the popping noise. At the time my headphones were only connected via bluetooth so I thought that was the issue.

I have since tested this issue with wired headphones and can say the problem still exists. This makes sense as some people are reporting the issue through their laptop speakers and other's through bluetooth. Now we know it's also occurring through the headphone jack, the source must be more fundamental than the bluetooth driver errors. I believe the errors seen in bluetoothd logs are only a result of what I've just seen from the coreaudio service.

The logs I've seen from the coreaudio service confirm exactly what I suspected. It's a driver issue with coreaudio under heavy system load. This can be seen by the following logs:

  4611         HALS_OverloadMessage.cpp:267   HALS_OverloadMessage: Overload due to HAL client proc exceeding io cycle budget
  4611         HALS_OverloadMessage.cpp:273   HALS_OverloadMessage: Overload due to the driver taking too long

Component: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreAudio.framework/Versions/A/CoreAudio

These logs show basically that the core audio client is "Overload"ing and exceeding some timeout deadline. This is direct confirmation that it is a result of high system load on potentially the CPU. I get that the file listed in the logs is the file which handles OverloadMessage calls, but it's called by CoreAudio to display these messages.

Pretty shocking considering Apple is a big player in the audio department and markets themselves as a platform for music creation.

I assume the apple engineers don't look at these posts but seriously what are you guys doing??!!