I was getting a lot of problems with the sound system.

When I ran the game through my headset on Direct X 11, it would crash on startup.
I fixed it by turning off Direct X 11 mode.

However, the game now crashes on graphical problems, so I had to swap back to Direct X 11. I updated all my drivers and I was able to play the game with sound through my speakers. But the sound would pop in and out and not play randomly.

If I swapped to my headset, it would again crash.

So I tolerated the speakers popping for a while and then I ended up purchasing the sound add on and ran the sound through my headset and I haven't had problems with the sound since.

The only issue now is I can't actually play the game without my headset. As much as I love the improved sound, some times I don't want to wear my headset and unfortunately, going back to speaker mode means the audio issues come back.