I've had a Sound Blaster AE-5 Plus for about nine months. During that time, I've been experiencing a persistent crackling issue. I finally did some research, found some different solutions which reportedly worked for folks, tried a few, and one finally worked for me! Apparently, a bunch of things can cause this crackling issue.
In my case, it was the equalizer! I just had to disable that and bam! Problem solved! If only Creative had just left that feature disabled by default. Or in my case, the developer of the open-source drive, since I'm on Linux. The funny thing about it is that, depending on the cause, this crackling issue isn't limited to a single operating system or a single driver; Windows and Linux users alike are experiencing this problem - and Linux users like myself have to use an open-source driver (not that we mind) because Creative isn't interested in supporting Linux.
Creative would do themselves a big favor if they just had the equalizer disabled by default. Then people could notice the crackling only after enabling the equalizer and realizing right away that the equalizer was the cause of the crackling. Creative could probably improve sales and prevent returns.
If you're experiencing this issue and disabling the equalizer doesn't solve the problem, some other solutions I found from my research are disabling G-Sync, switching to a different version of the Nvidia driver, and switching the sound filter to fast roll-off.
You also might need to turn off extra stuff like Crystalizer, Dialog Plus,, and Smart Volume.