Hi folks,
just wanted to share what helped for me.
Short Answer
Go to Windows sound manager and play around with the sample rate of your audio output (try 44kHz and 48kHz in particular)
Long Answer
After trying the CPU pinning and emulator pinning as suggested (great hint btw.), nothing seemed to work and it even got worse as my audio engine begin to lag for 4-20 seconds every minute PLUS the cracking and stuttering which had been present from the beginning on. I don't know exactly why, but somehow the VM seems to have struggles with down-sampling the audio, so I set all inputs and outputs to the highest sample rate (48000 Hz) and everything works fine.
The setup:
hyper-threading disabled
No cores isolated in the boot config
Cores 0-7 pinned to VM
Emulator tasks pinned to cores 8,9
All audio devices use 48kHz
I hope that someone can benefit from this minor discovery...
best wishes,
TheClockTwister