I have a USB external sound adapter plugged into my Emteria running Rpi3 (USB id's 0d8c:0014). It has always worked well with all apps. But since 0.5.12 it seems like any CPU load caused it's sound to break up.
So a simple way to demonstrate is playing a local mp3 file in vlc and go off and launch something else. The audio becomes broken up until things settle down again.
This is most obvious to me when I use Ultrasonic (a Subsonic client), as tracks start playing instantly but the sounds is broken up until the client has finished downloading the track in the background, then it settles down.
I can understand this could happen with extreme load, but this has become very much more sensitive over the last couple of releases. Anything changed to make this so much more brittle.