I've tried everything above and more including an entire reset of my pc with no luck. I've searched these forums, reddit, youtube and everything I could find on this particular issue but haven't seen anyone mention this exact problem so it looks like it isn't a common one or people haven't noticed it happening to them. Through the few days of troubleshooting and testing other things I realized it's actually more of a condensed issue where I only experience it in frontline pvp. I kind of just assumed it would be experienced in all kinds of group content such as alliance raids, hunt trains, world fate bosses, zadnor etc. because of how those are all large group content with many combat animations going but I seem to only experience this problem when I start up a frontline match. I've ran several alliance raids, world boss fates and hunts and have yet to run into this problem with any of that content so I can confirm it only happens within the pvp large group content. Once I found that out, I started to mess with all of the audio channels to see what was specifically the sound that was causing this to happen and found that it is absolutely the "Sound effects" option because I tried everything else like the "bgm", "ambience", and the "voices" setting etc. and only the battle sounds cut out. The voices of people as they attacked came through fine, the bgm never cut out, and the ambience never gave me issues either. I have looked at my system sound settings as well, changed audio format channel frequency and even other headsets other than my corsair hs80 but the problem still persisted. I eventually tried a complete reinstall of FFXIV and eventually after that didn't work out, a complete reinstall of windows. Sadly after getting everything set up again on a fresh FFXIV install, I checked today and running my daily frontline roulette, I still have this sound effect audio issue. I'm out of ideas for real this time so now I'm just hoping some miracle patch will come through one day and fix this issue I'm having lol