Scartchy sound in steam game over time – kill kodi proc to fix?

HI there,

This has been happening for the past year or so through 15-16-17 betas? I didn’t use steam before Kodi version ~15.

I have two computers, both running Debian unstable and steam.
Laptop is client, desktop is host for steam streaming.
Desktop runs steam in the background on boot and also kodi in the foreground. Running on top of a Openbox.
Pulseaudio is installed.

After an indefinite amount of time but normally at least an hour, the sound in the steam game (streamed to) on the laptop starts getting scratchy.
The scratchiness gets stronger and stronger until the audio is completely garbled.

Just recently I alt-tabbed out of steam on the laptop, ssh’d to desktop and killed the kodi process.
The audio in steam instantly restored.

Laptop is i5 haswell. Desktop is i3 + Nvidia 960.

I don’t know if this is kernel/pulse/steam/kodi/other error, but any suggestions on where to start would be good.
I will turn on kodi debugging and check the log and also check dmesg for next time.
I’ve never had scratchy sound just using kodi on the desktop.

It’s no big deal for me.