Sound Quality Degrades with Musescore Running

The sounds on my system is quite good whether I'm listening to videos or mp3s, etc. Yet when I launch Musescore while listening to something the sound level immediately dims and the fidelity is lost to an intolerable scratchiness. Likewise, any Musescore playback has the same loss of fidelity even without any other application playing in the background. Exported audio files play flawlessly so it must be some environmental misuse of the sound system. Randomly the problem will sometimes go away with the interaction of other sound applications like Audacity.

This is the only bump in the road for me with Musescore. The rest of the program is fantastic, open source or not, and that's coming off of the heels of Finale.

There are similar reports here but nothing seems to apply to my case.

Nick

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16GB
Revision OS: Ubuntu 17.10, Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore version (64-bit): 2.2.1, revision: 51b8386