MAX98357 I2S crackling audio – SOLUTION

So I’ve been searching this situation of a MAX98357 exterior DAC linked to an ESP32-S2. Using the next, copy-pasted instance resulted in crackling sound:

i2s_audio:
  i2s_lrclk_pin: GPIO03 # -> LRC
  i2s_bclk_pin: GPIO05  # -> BCLK

speaker:
  - platform: i2s_audio
    id: speaker_kerstdorp
    dac_type: exterior
    channel: mono
    sample_rate: 44100
    i2s_dout_pin: GPIO07  # -> DIN

media_player:
  - platform: speaker
    id: media_player_kerstdorp
    title: "Media Player Kerstdorp"
    announcement_pipeline:
      speaker: speaker_kerstdorp
      format: NONE  # disables transcoding in Home Assistant

(observe, this can be a stripped down, minimalistic model as I used to be debugging like madman)

This is a brand new, single-core board, so for a very long time, I’ve suspected that the problem was that I2S DMA was in some way interrupted by the wifi visitors, or esp-idf bug, or some situation brought on by new {hardware}.

Well, it wasn’t.

Long story brief, I ran into a pleasant little observe by full accident.

So it seems that MAX98357 is only a chip. When shopping for an inexpensive board on aliexpress, you typically get the mandatory bypass capacitors not noted. That implies that all {the electrical} spikes from ESP32 inject noise instantly into the facility provide of the MAX98357, inflicting the crackles.

As quickly as I added a 0.1 and a ten uF bypass capacitor (merely soldered between the facility provide’s GND and VCC – do double-check polarity), crackles disappeared utterly.

So I’m simply leaving this right here, possibly I’ll spare a couple of days of debugging for somebody:

ESP32-S2 if completely succesful to play streaming MP3s through I2S with out crackling or artifacts utilizing esphome’s fundamental examples.
Even the venerable ESP8266 is able to doing this.
I2S makes use of DMA, which is greater than able to dealing with audio output with out interruptions or crackles or different noticable artifacts.
You actually need to learn the producer’s doc – would have spared me days