Static noise when playing sound

From time to time I get a lot of static noise when playing sound. It stops when no sound is played (e.g. when music playback is stopped).

• Seems to be independent from output device (same symptons with either my speakers or headphones)
• When stopping sound, the static noise lingers for just a tiny bit. It doesn’t stop immediately
• Unplugging my speakers and then plugging them in again amplifies the symptoms.
• Opening the alsamixer GUI in the terminal and making sure that the levels are not in the red area makes things a bit better, but doesn’t solve this issue

Lastly, for what I can tell, this happens at completely random times. And it goes away just like that. I tried rebooting several times, no luck. At some point in the future it will be just fine.

So I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on and how to fix it.

For what it’s worth, running the following seems to fix the issue:

pulseaudio -k

As to why, I have no idea.

From pulseaudio man page:

-k | --kill: Kill an already running PulseAudio daemon of the calling user (Equivalent to sending a SIGTERM).

Edit: This works reliably for me. Whenever this issue comes up, I run this command to fix it.

I am not a specialist in this area and don't know why the following worked, but it appears to have fixed the exact same problem on my computer.

In the file /etc/pulse/default.pa change the line:

load-module module-udev-detect

to read:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

I found this on another thread where several others also claimed it solved the same audio problem for them.

Not an expert but in my case it was my headphones playing static noise but only when sound was playing.

Turned out it my headphones were over amplified (if that's the correct term). Turning down the headphone output with alsamixer fixed it.

I know this question is old but it still seems to be an issue so for those still interested I believe I have a reason for why pulseaudio -k fixes the problem (re @kleinfreund answer and @smirnoffs comment on that answer).

According to the man page for pulseaudio -k is short for --kill and kills the currently running PulseAudio daemon. The system will notice it stopped an start a new instance (hence why the static stops ... until the next time).

I have no idea why the static starts in the first place, maybe a bug or a configuration issue (but that doesn't narrow it down), I'm currently on the hunt for a permanent solution.

I tried all of the answers in the thread - none of them worked (I was scared it might be a HW problem). The only thing that surprisingly worked for me was turning the PC off, keeping it off for a minute and then turning it back on. Simple restarting the device did not work. After this, the problem disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.