On 9 Jan 2010, nix at esperi.org.uk uttered the following: > More oddly yet, if I start pavucontrol, whether locally or remotely, > before the remote application, the entire session is flawless: if I > start it while the choppy playback is going on, the choppiness vanishes. No it doesn't, not consistently anyway: remote qemu just started chopping even though pavucontrol was running. The diagnosis in Debian bug 533039 looks accurate to me: the plugin is disconnecting and reconnecting so fast that pavucontrol shows the volume line as a flickering blur, and it looks like each disconnection/reconnection round adds a bit of crackle (and probably loses some sound while it was disconnected). Why this only happens on remote connections is unclear, but maybe simply because network latency is zero on localhost.