Comment 22 for bug 574137

I can confirm that the solution of Luis Miguel does stop the audio distortion while leaving pulseaudio running.

For those that want to use this solution you may have to install "paprefs" (sudo apt-get install paprefs) and run it, if it is not in your system->preferences menu. After making the first change, I had to reboot before the new menu item appeared in "output" tab of the sound preferences app.

But what does making this change "do"? :-) I assume that nohz and highres are still "off". Are they? I have them off on my machine... so pulseaudio is still using "a less precise method of updating buffering" as Daniel said (see Message 19).