Crackling sound with Steam with Linux

Quick fix for audio crackling and distortion in Steam games on Linux by disabling PulseAudio timer-based scheduling

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.

via: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=920549