Any way to do a hard force of stereo (if that is the root cause of this issue)? I ask because I tried (I think) everything the internet has to offer and unfortunately nothing ended up getting get rid of the XACT error. Tried the R2.82 driver and a bunch of others and that basically forced a windows reinstall with how many things broke in the end. Still didn't work. Every driver (that I could get to install successfully, R2.82 unfortunately didn't as it spit out a bunch of errors on install and more constant errors in Event viewer), onboard audio disabled/enabled, external DAC (a very old and cheap one but that's all I had), every configuration out there, bios resets, game reinstall, directX reinstall, windows reinstall, everything I could think of... Every other game that I play works just fine so it's 100% some sort of software incompatibility with the engine this game uses that I just can't seem to figure out.

Game also hangs on exit maxing out a cpu thread until the process is killed if that's relevant info.

Maybe I missed something, but I've basically given up. Could just be Windows being Windows as with a 1809 Win 10 VM all of the problems disappear, but come on. Very annoying.

If nobody has any suggestions, then a virtual machine it is.