It will allow sound, you can go lowest or low for sound channel quality, any higher can cause lag/fps drops depending on the spec you play.
You will need to do it everytime you play D3, but it’s a lot faster (IMO) than replacing the dll file sometimes.
There are ways to configure it to fun D3 with just those 2 cores all the time, just need to Google the steps.
We’re really gonna be done with COVID before this bug is fixed Blizzard?
Straight up pathetic tbh.
Haven’t played in ages. Just started up again last night. Holy smokes what happened to the performance?
Really weird random freeze spikes that I’ve never seen before…
…something must have happened.
EDIT: for those that want to know-
Windows 10 64 bit version 20H2 (19042.906)
7700K no o/c
GTX 1080 no o/c driver version 465.89
16 gigs DDR4 (@3200)
Sound Blaster Z driver version 6.0.102.75 dated 12/1/20
For me this only hapen when:
Disable Diablo3 sounds
and
Listen Youtube music in background
I dont think Blizz going to do anything with this.
Delete the game, problem solved. Blizzard started of as the greatest gaming company we seen, to become a laughing stock world wide. Delete it
I tried this earlier today and it worked, then I shut down my PC and updated Windows. That was a really dumb thing to do, because now it doesn’t work, I even rolled back to the previous windows version when this fix worked but that didn’t help. Blizzard really has to do something about this. It’s unacceptable.
Still working for you? on GR 105+ i still get it 
I tried everything. In the end the spikes are always there.
They now announced a thread on it, they are aware 
what a joke. Back in early 90’s my computer ran games better then this. The fact that the playerbase are working on a fix more then people getting PAID to do a job is abselutly laughable. These blizzard employe’s gotta have a great life… watching youtube all day doing nothing. But hey, Diablo 4 will come out in 12 years… we can all gather together and bash their bugs then… because blizzard isnt the same company anymore at all. It’s now ran by abselute fools who probably paid their way into blizzard. Fed up with this company
Lynki, thank you so much! Your fix was so simple but it works!
I’m getting this issue really bad. Blizzard please fix this!
Can we have an update on this issue @Blizzard Entertainment please?
We’re not really entertained when we can’t do anything in game and are literally forced into using stupid workarounds that may or may not work.
You advertise new seasons and still hype the game and push new content into it, why not fix a bug that’s making the game literally unplayable for so many of your players?
I don’t see how this could benefit the Diablo community at all, even if you would want to steer away players into newer games when they become available, we will still have a soar taste since this Diablo experience is so freaking awful.
I have to say that i’ve tried all of the workarounds and some work, for some time but they revert to not working after a while.
Can you step up and fix this in the near future or at least acknowledge this issue and start working on it?
So annoying, come on…
You just can’t do anything when you freeze 5 times in a rift.
Can’t push, can’t really farm, unless you have nerves of steel… and so on.
FIX THIS!!!
Same problem here. 5 to 10 second freezes + allot of stuttering. After reading this had to do with a (sound?) driver fmod I lowered the Sound channel setting in Diablo 3 from 128 to 32 and this resolved the issue for me.
TLDR: Try reduce Daiblo 3 Sound channels to 32 or lower.
EDIT: freezes still happening but overall game runs allot smoother with 32 channels. Sometimes i hear strange sounds, like a low gurgling sound, don’t think the game has this sound and it is some abberation of the sound driver?
Same thing here,5-10sec of freezing then I’m dead, that’s the first time I got that kind of freeze
Hope they will fix it tomorrow,can’t play anymore !
Any updates? This makes the game feel terrible.
Getting the freezes really bad with firebirds with vacuum tornados in T16 speeds.
Try sound channels to 16 or 32 people. It has helped allot for me.
The (gutteral) sound abborations started speaking! It appears that they are the played character’s voice lines but heavily distorted, like extremly muffled, low and gutteral. Def something up with the sound system
Blizzard please fix!
Something that might help people that can’t get the .dll working is make sure you’re putting it in the x64 folder in the main diablo folder if you are using the 64 bit version. I was a little blind and didn’t notice it! Hope this helps anyone coming here trying to figure out why it’s not working possibly!
Like all others in this thread, I have been experiencing this 5-10 sec freezing issue when playing Diablo 3 since June of 2020 in Season 21 and Season 22. Almost every 1-3 minutes or so (it happened intermittently at random) without fail, the game client would freeze for a few seconds and I’ve been putting up with this for over a year… and I think I may have found something that ‘mitigates’ it completely, so I wanted to share in case this holds true after hours more of testing…
All I did was set the Sound Channels to Lowest (16) and made sure to close any Edge (Chromium) or Chrome browsers, as well as any sound applications like Spotify when playing the game… after doing this and a dozen GR70’s over a 20 minute testing period, the game hasn’t frozen a single time for me… I actually got mixed test results when trying to listen to music to Spotify in the background when playing (as I usually always do this when I play) and wonder if that may be a possible root cause somehow… so I just closed Spotify to be safe (and instead played Spotify on my PC speakers from my phone via casting / Airplay tech 
)
I’m cautiously optimistic this may have resolved it, but I don’t want to count my eggs before they hatch - I still need to play for several more hours to make sure this ‘holds’ true… I will update this post if I find it freezing again after a certain period of time playing & testing.
I saw @ SilverFox mention setting the CPU affinity and @Lynki’s suggestion to turn the in game Sound Channels to the lowest setting to reduce lag**
Personally, I tested setting the affinity to CPUs 0 and 1 and didn’t notice any freezing… but I didn’t like the idea of throttling my CPU or limiting it to just a few cores/threads if the game can use more [that could result in higher FPS?)]… regardless, I wanted to try some other things suggested earlier in this thread besides setting the CPU affinity and besides modifying the fmod dll as many have suggested… just to see if I can play with sound and not throttle my CPU - to have my cake and eat it too!
**While the lag not the same as this long-standing 5-10 seconds freezing bug (some people were reporting doing this to help with the Firebirds Mirror Image lag also), I decided to give it a try since the main root cause of the freezing bug seems to be related to integrated Realtek sound cards in and the in game sound (and/or sound card drivers, Windows updates to sound - or any number of root causes related related to in-game sound).
[edit] after hours more of testing, I started to see freezing again. The only work around that works (outside of replacing the DLL every time) is setting the CPU affinity to cores 0 and 1…