Comment 10 for bug 1353013

I found this issue a while ago and ended up going with the solution of using the front audio jack which caused no issues...until the mini jack got broken off inside and I was forced to use the rear jack again which resurfaced the crackling issue.

The weird part is I completely disconnected the front audio jack cabling, and yet it would still periodically crackle and attempt to switch to the headphone jack. The workaround I found was to force disable the front jack using hdajackretask from alsa-tools-gui: http://askubuntu.com/a/448138

Leaving this here in case anyone else finds it useful.