I'm using FC20 w/ Cinnamon and experiencing strange sound issues. Playback of the sound itself is completely fine but when I'm using either Skype or Google Hangouts, the person on the other end can hear some crackling sounds from my mic (almost like vinyl popping). I have a friend who just started using Zorin 8 and the same problem occurs on his end (I can hear cracking on his mic) . Is there some tweaking of PulseAudio that needs to be done or something? Should I be using a different audio server like Jack? Maybe it's buffer underruns or something like that? When I try and record my voice using Audacity, I hear no problems. I've heard this is due to the fact it uses the ALSA device directly instead of going through PulseAudio.

Any direction on where to start or how Linux audio works in general would be much appreciated!
Thanks

This may sound strange, but soundcards these days are modular inside. For instance, the hda_analyzer scripts for hda-intel cards on alsaproject.org show a variety of interlinked sections.

Some unwanted section has volume. That's the issue. Try killing volume on everything that doesn kill the audio in alsamixer, for starters.