gmail-gchat-gtalk choppy audio on ubuntu / pulseaudio

using the browser plugin for gmail's voice-chat (sometimes referred to as gchat or gtalk, though i think that technically those are other products) on my ubuntu 64bit box with onboard audio (via vt1708s) resulted in choppy sound and lots of dropouts. my typical test was counting from one to ten ... you could hear most of the numbers clearly, but several would be entirely silent. i tried 2 other boxes running 32bit ubuntu and didn't have any trouble

after some googling i found this post that details how to correct the problem (see the answer by grimwisdom). rjincorvia (the asker) has done a good job of letting people with similar questions know that his post is what they need to read, but the keywords don't match the symptoms that i was seeing, and really don't even match the symptoms he describes, which makes finding the answer using a google search difficult. so writing this post to make it easier for others to find

grimwisdom says to enter the shell prompt:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=myGoogleVoice

pactl load-module module-loopback sink=myGoogleVoice

and then select "monitor of null output" from gmail::settings::chat::voice chat::mic

to make the changes permanent, add those lines (without the pactl) to the end of /etc/pulse/default.pa