Also been getting this. I ORIGINALLY put it down to my being on a laptop which – although by all accounts ‘should’ have been able to run the game just fine – was struggling with anything involving more than a couple of players, and had to be on low settings all the time. But less than a month ago I started using a brand new computer, built for gaming. This had been doing perfectly until this evening when the annoying sound issue started to show itself again. It often involves pets, flying ones are particularly dreadful. The rest of the game sound is muted and all I hear is REALLY loud (no matter how loud the settings are) and crackly popping, crackling, odd flapping noises.
As the OP mentioned, this happens only in GW2, and the speakers/headset are fine for everything else.
I’ve seen a lot of people reporting these issues since launch but not found any clue to what causes it or what we can do to fix it yet.
