PulseAudio randomly started glitching out for me yesterday. Audio began to crackle and glitch, and several processes went bunta on the CPU: polkitd, dbus-daemon, kwin_x11 all chugging at least half a core each.
There are various suggestions on the web about how to fix this, but a number of older ones (such as this one on Ubuntu forums suggest deleting the pulse config. And what do you know, that one works.
In Kubuntu 18.04 (and probably many other *buntu variants), the config is in: ~/.config/pulse.
