There is no winning here otherwise - either some games are slower and don't crackle, or they aren't slow and crackle.
There are other options. First of all, yes, I guess the current timer management itself with relative delays is not accurate and it is solved with https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/8628 which is however stuck for some reason. Then, the audio surely doesn't crackle for every PA setup and every game. The first thing here is to understand what is going wrong with the specific setup and game. Then, worst case, if there is indeed a systematic problem and it can't be solved by avoiding incompatible PA setups the solution is maybe introducing a separate PA update loop with its own buffer, so that PA audio pushes are decoupled from mmdevapi timeline. But before going for this complication I believe the actual exact problem must be understood. -- https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/10792#note_138464