Too many sound effects tanking performance

As title says when there are too many sound effects playing at the same time the game becomes a slideshow, this can be mitigated by reducing audio channels to low BUT that causes issues with sound effects not playing anymore and there doesn't seem to be a good priority on what does and doesn't get played, making listening to audio cues a bit RNG based at times.

I didn't notice it that much in the early game but once you get to maps with lots of modifiers it gets very noticeable and really hurts the experience/playability. I know part of it is because CPUs have to do some of the work with sound but I've played games that are far more demanding and I've been able to leave sound channels on high without these problems.

Does lowering the sound channels make a noticeable improvement to frames drops in maps? Could you give me a rough estimate by how much? I sit at 120 fps for nost of the campaign and then in maps will dip into the 30s when the screen gets cluttered.

If I'm not having too many sounds the game generally runs at 100 - 150 fps. It goes down to 10 - 20 fps if I leave it on high channels, 40-50 fps if turned down to low and it happens specifically when there are a lot of sounds playing at the same time a lot of effects are on the screen. The quickest way for me to have it happen is to group with my friend who plays a grenade spam merc, two groups of five grenades detonating is all it takes to bring both our systems to a crawl. He's on a i5 13600k witha 4070Ti Super and I'm on a i9 9900k with a 4070 Super, we both have 32 gigs of RAM and we can both play Unreal 5 games on high settings at 1440p without any sound issues and that engine is MUCH harder on CPUs than PoE2.

From that result I'm assuming the issue is actually to do with how the engine handles sound, it feels like it's either part of the main thread instead of it's own thread on a different core or the way the sound thread interacts with the main thread has some kind of bug/inefficiency (like a lot of nested if, then, else commands constantly interrupting/pausing the main thread).

In 0.1 i had to lower the sound settings to make the game even remotly playable. Haven't switched it back since.