https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41599
--- Comment #15 from celestialtuba@gmail.com --- (In reply to Andrew Eikum from comment #14)
(In reply to celestialtuba from comment #11)
(In reply to celestialtuba from comment #10)
I can confirm this is happening to me as well. This was happening to me on Ubuntu 14.04 using Wine 1.9.16, as well as on 4.8.8-2 Arch using 1.9.23. It started for me on the voice chat patch. It does seem to be coming from battle.net as others suggested, however in addition to whenever I receive a /w, it also happens when one of my "favorite" friends logs on or off. I'd be happy to provide anything I can to try to help fix this issue.
Now that I think of it, I think this coincided with installing pulseaudio. I remember I was relieved when I installed WoW on Arch that I wasn't getting the loud bursts of static anymore, and out of the blue it started happening again. I did not connect the dots in my head until I saw someone say something about pulseaudio, so I think this may be a pulseaudio specific thing.
Nothing to do with PulseAudio. Likely your ALSA setup was allowing only one application to play audio at a time, so the B.net client was unable to play its broken audio. Installing PA allowed multiple applications to play audio, and now you can hear the bug.
That sounds sensible. Thanks for the explanation!