I decided to push forward into the prologue to see if the audio issues improve at all and they actually do somewhat once I get away from the tavern and the people right outside it.
There's still static and sound tearing and it doesn't sound good at all but it's a lot more...playable sounding after that. Still need to get this fixed to make it better though. It sounds pretty bad right now even if it improves quite a bit after moving away from the starting spot.
I wonder if all the ambience from all the npcs on screen at once is causing it to get even worse?