The issue
Running Cracking Units causes a high pitch whine, which has now given me headaches enough times to make me certain of the connection. Playing the game with the cracking units stopped results in no headaches.
Expected behavior
Being able to play for hours without having to quit due to headaches.
To Reproduce
Stat cracking units and listen to them using my ears.
Additional context
I wondered if this would be a feature request or a bug report. I decided on bug report because the end result is that I'm unable to use cracking units, which is clearly unintended behavior. Playing without using cracking units is also destroying the gaming experience and so is muting the entire game. In fact having reached a state in the game where I consider them critical for expansion have essentially killed the game for me as I can't progress.
As for a solution I'm thinking something like autogenerating a list of all constructable buildings, where the audio can be muted, either as a boolean or as a volume slider. That will once and for all solve this issue for current and future buildings with minimal if any maintenance. On top of that, it can be convenient to control the noise level from various densely built factories even if the noise may not directly be causing headaches.