Well add me to the list of people affected by this bug. Turning sounds down to 32 worked as a temporary fix, but it’s not ideal.
Man, first the Nvidia flickering issue with WoW that FINALLY got fixed after 6 months, and now I have this bug to deal with!
Going from 128 to 32 doesn’t seem to be THAT noticeable, but still sucks.
Edit: Had to go to 16 for groups. Really noticeable now :(. How is this not fixed? It’s pretty game breaking.
Tried the DEV channel version of Windows 11 earlier, and game actually feels better and no freezes yet 
Will report back after some higher gr’s 110 was ok and no freezes normally 3 or 4 for me.
3 hours of gaming and NO rage quit yet! Windows 11 dual boot working great for this bug so far and I have sound at full quality 
- Hopefully others are also testing so we can confirm Windows 11 will fix the lack of effort on craptivisions behalf.
yep stopped playing two seasons ago not because i dont like the game i realy like it but the freezing was just too annoying and im sorry bliz but bypassing the sound is a lame cop out i figured it had been long enough maybe they got it fixed but they didnt dosent even look like they care
How is it after a few days of play? Can anyone else confirm that Windows 11 fixes the underlying issue?
It’s quite possible the issue was originally caused by Microsoft and not Blizzard and Blizzard was under an NDA per the pending Windows 11 release - e.g. even if they knew Windows 11 would fix the underlying issue with the audio, they may not have been allowed to tell the public / forums about it…
Still enjoying D3 in Windows 11, shame I have to dual boot to play one game! No more micro stutter and no more freezing (FMOD issues). I was getting freezes all the time on Windows 10. My advice would be to install 11 on a spare HD and test yourself, no harm in trying 
After reading a lot of posts on this issue, I decided to run the game on my old workhorse PC with the Windows 7 Premium operating system.
Surprisingly, I played a full, continuous 10 hours in Hardcore mode without a single stutter, freeze or disconnect. This is compared to my new, high-powered rig running Windows 10 which earlier in the day, froze 4 times in the space of an hour.
edit: Played 8 hours Wednesday, Gr 80 to GR 120, both solo and multiplayer without any problems whatsoever. Most enjoyable session of D3 I’ve had for months!
My thinking is it’s an old game built for an old operating system. So far, it seems rock solid. Though fmodx is part of the issue, I think Windows 10 is the ultimate culprit. Considering that every issue of Windows has been plagued with errors and problems, this comes as no surprise. Only every 3rd or 4th iteration of Windows seems to be adequately functional. i.e. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 7 and possibly Windows 11 as per Crinel above.
I’ll post again if this issue rears its ugly head in its ‘new’ environment.
Still working on this?
Even if you said you are I wouldn’t believe it tbh. 1+ year later and this issue still exists and hasn’t been solved.
My 150 member clan is really frustrated with this “sound freeze”. Most of the clan has stopped playing HC because of the issue. Is there any word for Blizz as to what is going on. Is it a Blizz issue or a Windows 10 issue? A simple question why no answer?
TLDR. I don’t know if this was answered. With Diablo running, Open task manager>Details tab>Diablo 3>Right Klik and select set affinity>unselect all and select 1&2. close. You need to do that every time you log on. That should fix the micro freezes. You can play with sound with this fix.
this dosent work for me still the same
Hi Crinel,
with the W11 version 22000.1, Diablo 3 ran extremely well and very quickly, without errors.
With the W11 version 22000.65, Diablo also ran well, but I often noticed micro stutters.
Greetings from Germany. 
Happy belated birthday thread!
We understand you are a small indie company but 1+ year seems to be a long time to solve a game breaking bug guys.
So I take it the issue isn’t going to get fixed on Blizzard’s end.
Thanks for the thousands of hours of gameplay though (actually playing).
Looking forward to D4! 
Hey guys (please excuse the 2nd rate english), i had this issue this last season… i play mainly support (Monk/DH in group) and DH (solo). I have found 3 fixes so far and right now i can say for sure that one of them works for me.
So:
- after i opened the game i opened the task manager (i have win10) and found out that the blizz app launcher had 2 instances: one in apps and one in background. I asked myself “what is this?” (to the background process) “will it kill the game? well… if it does i will open it again…” i stopped that process and the game had 1 crash in about 6 hours of playtime… it was the game itself that crashed, BUT no lags what-so-ever. NONE! It might be that the launcher from the background was mainly at fault for me…I have the same problem with my new gaming PC. Blizzard PLEASE FIX THIS PROBLEM
Blizzard does not take care about you guys or this error.
It is still present after 2 years.
A fast and short solution can be to disable the entire sound for the Mirror images and spectral blades.
Seems impossible for Blizzard since they have no guys working on this. For this reason we have to disable the entire sound of D3 with the fmodex64 workaround which helps to prevent lags and disconnects but you have to play without sounds…
Horrible what Blizzard is doing.
that is one reason why they are getting worse and losing players.
I believe they did NOT fix the freeze issue with 2.7.1. The fmodx64.dll is untouched!
If so this company is a disgrace to all faithful D3 players…i can’t put my frustration into words.
Even with 717 replies and nearly 85k views in this thread this severe game breaking issue is COMPLETELY IGNORED. Unbelievable.
I will never ever buy Diablo 4 if they handle “fixing” important bugs in that manner.
UPDATE: Well done, STILL 5-10 sec freezes on my Razer 17" Notebook with mobile RTX 2080! Nothing happened…Nothing fixed. Thanks.
Replacing the fmodx64.dll again fixes this severe problem but you will have no sound at all. Looks like all the players that suffered from this problem are done with D3.
That’s when you buy graphics for a lot of money and AMD goes fine
Freeze is from game or server. You can do nothing until Blizzard fix it…