Yes, we added a gating circuit to newer versions of Speaker pHAT to completely eliminate it, and added Pulseaudio setup to our installers to tackle it on older boards from the software side.
I thought it could be fixed in hardware, good to know you fixed it, is that the same on your stereo version of the board.
Yep, pHAT BEAT has the same fix. It’s basically a transistor gate with a capacitor that ungates the clock signal if frame-sync (LRClock) is running. This prevents the Pi from sending any invalid clock-only signals to the DAC under any circumstances, so it doesn’t get into a bad state.