Well, I think I am encountering my first problem. When listening to talk radio, I started noticing my speakers crackling a lot yesterday Yesterday, was also one of the few times that it's been in the rain so I hope water didn't leak anywhere. Has anyone else had this problem?

Thanks

On all stations? And podcasts?

My radio does not do this. However, it may be that the source material is scratchy. So please confirm.

I have been hearing it on the talk radio channels that I listen to on Sirius The thing is it wasn't a problem beforehand listening to those same shows. That's what has me worried

Yup. Sounds like a trip to the dealer is warranted.

Yeah today they replaced my front speakers for me. On my drive home it sounded better but at times I still heard the sound However, once I turned off the Automatic Volume adjustment option that seemed to help dramatically.

Does anyone know what that actually does? Is that to lower and raise my volume based on the drive or for the Navigation voice?

That's great to know then because it was starting to cause some disappointment for me. At least if the sounds stay away, I can be at ease now.

I just disabled auto adj vol this morning based on the feedback herein. Will report back with any noteworthy notes.

What stereo system do you have in your car?
I understand the Automatic Volume Adjustment changes the volume level of your music system depending on how much engine/road noise you are making. So if you have the music on at a moderate level such that you like it at 1000 rpm and 35 mph, it will change that music level when you are accelerating at 2500 rpm or traveling at 65 mph. I'm thinking this is done by calculation rather than by measuring cabin ambient noise levels.

Anyway, the reason I ask is that it would make sense for all the calculations/adjustments to be done in the digital domain, and thus the volume compensations could be done most easily with the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) system. One might imagine that if that isn't really dialed it there could be sound blips as the adjustments are cut in. I know the Burmester systems have DSP, don't know if the base system has it. Did you happen to notice if the blips coincided with you accelerating/decelerating?

Well, I have the Burmester premium sound system (but not the super high end 3d one) . In fact that crackling was still happening even if I am just standing still. The funny thing is, I don't remember it happening until last week and I hadn't changed any settings.

That's sure not my idea of funny. Sorry to hear that.
I still suspect this is electronics and not speakers. While I don't have a lot of experience with bad speakers, when they are truly bad the speaker itself is all garbled, it hasn't been pops and crackles.
You could try a couple things to further isolate the problem. Move the fader all the way to the front and to the back. If front and back speakers are crackling, its almost certainly not the speakers nor their wiring/speaker connections. You might also try turning down the bass/midrange on your equalizer and listen up close to a tweeter (obviously not if the car is moving!). This could be harder to hear because the frequencies are so high. But the point is: if you have popping and cracking coming from more than one speaker it's probably electronics or a loose wire somewhere (like up near the amp). MB would have to get into this deeper.

I get this issue only when connecting my iphone to the system via Apple CarPlay. The most notable change is when I'm listening to a podcast, voice distortion/crackling. If I disconnect and just use bluetooth to stream the audio, the quality is much better with zero distortion. This makes no sense to me, in every other car I've used CarPlay in, CarPlay has always provided superior audio quality, as it should being directly connected to my phone. I welcome any suggestions for improvement to this problem. I will try disabling the auto volume and see if that makes a difference. Note I've tried all sorts of different cords, no changes noted b/w cords.

Just tried it, no change. I am nearing the A service, so I'll add this to that work order, as well as making sure everything is updated appropriately.

Did you try a different USB port? If it works better, than the initial port is likely defective.

So I just did that and found that the two ports in the armrest work much better and sound great. The port where the cupholders are (and the only one that supports carplay) is the culprit. Hope the dealership agrees and can fix without destroying my console/dash.

Pleased to learn that you isolated it to the port. Hopefully the dealer will easily swap in a new one and your issue will be resolved.

it’s not the port. It’s not the car at all. Go to settings in your iPhone.....Music....make sure both sound check and the EQ is set to off. It was the iphones eq settings that was doing it. I turned those off and now all is well.

How did you switch to the armrest port? Far as I know only the cup-holder port offers screen-mirroring? How'd you play music off your phone through the armrest port?

Do you mean you had audio files in your phone storage?