For me it's headset dependent. My Bose gets unbearable noise, while my Sony set gets barely nothing at all. I have feeling that the jack in the standard controller is terrible. Mine feels very loose and wobly. I can alter / provoke the noise with Bose by pressing the face buttons.
Interesting. All my cans are Sony, so maybe that's why I didn't think it was headphone-dependent. My jack seems secure, but yeah - I wouldn't be surprised if it's shoddy internals. I really wish it's something Microsoft would address either way. While I do have a pair of wireless gaming headphones, they don't sound nearly as good as regular cans.
I've literally been in games before where the static got so bad that my controller died and had to be re-paired. Now, when I hear the static getting especially bad, I just pull the cord out of the controller because I know it's about to disconnect.