Client loses sound randomly

[drebbe]

1) It drops randomly. Sometimes in-game during a dungeon or boss fight and sometimes when returning back to game after ALT+TAB.
2) I can't really tell. Seems like something breaks the audio engine of the game but what I cannot tell
3) I'm using my on board audio. My motherboard is Gigabyte Z370 Gaming 7 (Realtek® ALC1220 codec & ESS9018Q2C chip)
4) I have disabled everything else and now I have only 2 devices. Speakers High Definition Audio Device and 2nd Speakers Audio Device (the 2nd is the motherboard's front panel IO).
5) I have a headset connect to the front panel IO. XIV doesn't allow for on the fly switching of audio output device. The game is using the default playback device as set by Windows. In order to change it a restart of the client is required.
6) No. My Desktop PC is boring. No programs or overlays are installed. Nvidia's GeForce Experience overlay is also disabled. No Fraps, DPS meters, MSI Afterburners or anything else is running while XIV runs. I have only a browser open and ALT+TAB between that and XIV. The sound drop issue happens even when not ALT+TAB. Specific programs cause it to drop the sound when launched such as Discord. This is why I use Skype atm. Firefox browser also causes it to drop the sound though I cannot tell when. Using Chrome or Edge seems mostly OK but again I cannot tell because it happens at random. Most of the times the game does not crash with an error message. It just loses sound.
Again this issue is very old. I had this with my old PC since 2.0 launched but it wasn't so frequent.

Gigabyte Z370 Gaming 7 looks like it has an issue with the sound card intermittently dropping out causing the driver to reload which would explain how you are exposing FFXIV's audio bug. Looks like some people solved the problem by turning off Crystal Voice but others had to completely disable it and use another sound card.

Shut your computer off completely and let it sit for about a minute and then turn it back on. I bet that will prolong how long it takes for audio to stop working which leads me to believe its a hardware issue with the motherboard.


edit: you should be able to see if this is the case by disabling the onboard sound system in the bios and using HDMI audio output on your video card. If the problem goes away you isolated your problem.

edit2: The above looks like its for the Z270 not yours. Seems like gigabyte has a lot of audio issues lately. You can try downloading different drivers and see if that fixes your problem: https://www.tenforums.com/drivers-ha...r-version.html