Scratching noise when playing music/Thai fonts rendered strangely

When playing music in Totem and browsing the web using Chromium, if I use my mouse-wheel to scroll up and down a page the audio output becomes "scratchy" as if someone was brushing a microphone against fabric.

I presume that this is some sort of driver error?

I'm running Ubuntu on a Asus P5N-E which a quick google tells me uses a Realtek ALC883.

Also Thai fonts don't tend to render correctly in some web pages, the script is very hard to read and it's not uncommon for symbols to overlap until they are highlighted, correcting the rendering.

Is it possible to install Windows fonts on Ubuntu? As the clarity seems to be better for me.

Any more information need just request, but I am new to linux so I will probably need to be told how to get it.

Thanks.