I've been looking at various posts and it seems different people have been experiencing different issues related to sound. For some, they get music, but no battle sound effects at all. In my case, I hear everything, and sometimes it plays just fine, but then it'll start crackling very badly, both music and sound effects. It happens much more noticeably whenever there's a lot going on in screen in my case, but I've had it happen in the login queue and in the inn room where there aren't other players/effects causing abnormal load on the game client.

In my case, when it does happen, my FPS also tends to drop severely, like down to 10-12 FPS when it normally runs a solid 59-60 (I have it limited to not exceed vsync). Normally an FPS drop occurs when maxing out the CPU or the GPU, though I've seen it happen with the CPU at only about 60%. I haven't checked the GPU load, but my GPU significantly outclasses my CPU and has never been taxed by FFXIV before. FFXIV, when bottlenecked, has always been because of CPU on my system. The CPU/GPU mismatch is due to 1, thinking I would have upgraded the CPU around no (thanks COVID), and 2, another game I play which requires an absurdly high amount of memory on the GFX card. That game tends to more evenly tax both CPU and GPU at the same time, but I have been wanting to update my CPU for more than year now.