Rubbish (buzzing) sound on USB speakers

[ifnotforyou]

Hi,
this is my old problem, which was solved for unknown reason with Mint 17. Unfortunately I can no longer use Mint 17, because of unrelated issue.

I'm currently using LM18 XFCE 64, but the same thing happens on Cinnamon edition, on Mint 16 or for that matter on Fedora.

I'm having some sort of buzzing sound on USB speakers (some LaCie model), they work flawlessly on Windows, though.

Sometimes I also only get one channel playing, usually just turning volume up and down sorts this part of the problem.

It must be something with PULSE or ALSA or whatever, I don't really understand any of this. I know I once sort of sorted this with installing one of those two and disabling the other or something similar - something I found on web, looking for various solutions to Linux sound problems. But it was not really an elegant solution.

Is there a simple trick to solve sound problems in Linux that would likely also sort my problem?

Interesting thing is that I only get this distorted sound on USB speakers, but using my headphones with USB DAC works perfectly.

Thanks.