After playing for an extended time, I started having a variety of weird issues with the game’s audio. First, during large fights the game’s sound would go silent for 15-30 seconds at a time. Waypointing to different maps also triggered the same behavior. At the time I just shrugged it off as my computer not keeping up (it’s a higher end desktop) but then I went into the SAB and things got weirder.
While attempting 2-3 tribulation mode, I eventually noticed that I had no sound effects, only music. Later, after dying and returning to a checkpoint, the music stopped and total silence ensued. I dealt with it for a good 30 minutes before attempting to fix it. I first tried changing the output device within the game to something else and then back to the original device. This immediately brought the music back, but no sound effects. After dying several times in quick succession (corner jumps on charr are hard) eventually the music ceased as I returned to a checkpoint. Getting sent to moto brought the music back, but it then ceased again as I was sent back into the map. Getting sent to moto several times after that had no effect on the silence. I tried my same technique of changing the output device, to no avail this time. Changing volume settings and sound quality had no effect either. After finally finishing the zone, I returned to both the hub and Rata Sum with silence in both places.
Restarting the game did fix the issue. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to replicate the problem. Purely speculating, I think the problem is related to the fact that I had been playing for far too long (6 hours or so when it started) and that there might be a potential memory leak with the audio system. I hesitated posting this because this is the first time I’ve had an issue with the audio, but I happened to be speaking to an employee in-game at the time and they encouraged me to do so. I hope this was just a one-off thing on my end, but I’ll be glad to give more info if I can.