I have a pair of Creative speakers hooked up to my pc. (not usb). Today they started crackling when I was playing other sound for no reason. I hooked them up to my phone instead, and there was no crackling. I tried other inputs on my pc, but there were either no audio (cause they weren't audio inputs), or there was still crackling.
Specs:
GPU: Nvidia GTX970
CPU: Intel i7-6700
Specs:
GPU: Nvidia GTX970
CPU: Intel i7-6700