speech-dispatcher ruins audio quality

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For a while now, speech-dispatcher has been consistently tearing my audio quality a new one. Whenever speech-dispatcher is opened, all audio playing becomes horrendously crackly. Usually, after a varying period of time, the crackling subsides. The only other way I've found to stop it is by killing all four(!?) speech-dispatcher processes. Muting their respective four(?!) streams has no effect, nor does killing any one specific process out of the four. Even after the crackling subsides, it starts again when switching to a different TTY and back.

My speech dispatcher version is 0.8.6