I would like to add something, I havent read all the comments in this 54 page thread, but I've been playing Endwalker since Early Access... playing it up till last Tuesday (12/21) and I had literally 0 problems with the audio, not a stutter, not a pop, nothing. I did ALL kinds of content, from dungeon grinding as a Reaper on launch, to watching all the MSQ cutscenes and doing all the trials-- nothing of the sort.

Patch 6.01 comes out, the game sound stutters here and there, I don't pay too much mind... then I get to specifically the "Asphodelus: Fourth Circle" fight and that one... the music sounded SO crunchy, stuttering all of a sudden, no real FPS drops that would cause this, but I was stunned, I thought something was wrong with the specific song... but then I start doing different things and starting seeing no, its not just the one song.

I hope this a priority because-- even though my CPU is older, my game was working fine UNTIL whatever changes they tried to "fix" people's problems, making it worse for them and introducing it to others.

Hopefully this account helps and shows them that as much as it could be a hardware thing, it isn't fair if even someone that had no problem before got "introduced" the problem with an update-- seems like its completely avoidable if that's the case, doesn't it?