I don't know if this will help, but I'd look into rolling back, or updating your sound card drivers. I don't know if it's the same with Radeon, but NVIDIA automatically installs new 3D sound drivers every time I update my GPU drivers. I then have to go back into my sound "Properties" and reset everything to the way it was before.
Now, I
do have a dedicated sound card which does free up
some system resources, but personally, I don't see any reason why your integrated sound system shouldn't be able to handle SH4 with the "
'Realistic Sound Travel Time" enabled. I think you simply have to look at your system sound properties/drivers.