As a daily user of both Flash and Chrome, I have yet to run into any audio issues* myself, nor have my friends/family who's Hackintosh I maintain.
I wouldn’t normally post just to say all is good, however I feel the need to ask as Shiitaki used the same motherboard as my best friend, and ppohio and I share the same model as well. Neither of us have issues yet you two do so I find this curious (and sadly have no answers).
Question: Do either of you use a DSDT or HDAEnabler?
* Other than feedback noise from either my hard drives or PSU. I get this from my Asus Xonar U3 and SB Recon3D PCIe as well.
I started getting the problems after going to 10.9.1. I never had any issues on 10.8.4. As for DSDT or HDAEnabler, I used the same simple setup that I used to setup Mountain Lion, which was the basic DSDT-free setup. I just check the ALC898 (without DSDT) option in MultiBeast, which automatically installs the HDAEnabler.
And I'm pretty sure that the issues with Chrome didn't start immediately, either. It is possible that I'm just mis-remembering, but I am pretty sure I used my system for a couple weeks on 10.9.1 before Chrome crapped out. I have it open all the time and as a video editor am constantly uploading and checking material on YouTube and Vimeo, so when it started happening I noticed immediately. If it were *just* the drivers you would think it would have happened immediately after moving to Mavericks, but that wasn't the case. So I'm totally stumped.
It is possible that 10.9.2 may clear all of this up, but I am an Avid editor and can't move to 10.9.2 until Avid updates their software to work with it. It is also why I am very anxious to roll-back my drivers until I am done with my current project - static-y sound is better than no sound when you're on deadline!
(And before you ask why I upgraded to Mavericks when everything was working perfectly in Mountain Lion - because Apple forces you to Mavericks for the new version of Compressor
)
As for the "set your MIDI Setup to 96kbps", that is working alright for Chrome but when I am working in Final Cut, Avid, Premiere, etc - the MIDI setup reverts to the project settings which is consistently 16 or 24kbps at 44.1 or 48khz. It is a good band-aid for the non-work times though!
I have a USB DAC in the mail and will try that - if it works I'll roll my drivers back per TonyMac's suggestion and report back.