We are now upgrading to 4.18.1 and for us at least all of the pops and crackles that we ran into have now gone. We can set the main volume to 0 and no sounds play, no corruption occurs in the audio, so thank you heaps Minus_Kelvin for all of that.
Sorry that isn’t of much help ZeJudge, the code above was for 4.17, which as you have seen has changed a lot for 4.18. Are you getting the sounds like in the videos I posted?