As someone suggested much earlier in the thread, I tried to half all of my audio settings - for some reason it was a huge improvement. I do hear a crack here and there but it's definitely much less. When I turn it back on to my usual settings (meaning something like vfx or performance lower, bgm and voice high while master being around 10), the crackling shows up again. So it would appear having the individual audio settings too high will cause the issues, at least in my case. No idea what it actually means since I know next to nothing about audio, but I thought writing it down might be useful to somebody.