Audio Errors

I am getting a crackling and popping in particular when dialogue happens (including my character when I kill rares and such) as well as sometimes randomly in town (seems worse if it's Highgate or the epilogue). Is this a known problem with some sort of fix, or should I reinstall? I'm not using Steam and feel like "verify integrity of game cache" would be really handy. Is there a similar feature outside Steam, or do you just have to complete reinstall?

This won't help with checking the game cache, but I just had some very odd reverb and crackling issues with my sound in PoE, and it turned out to be my sound card drivers.

I have a "Realtek High Definition Audio" device under 'Sound, Video and Game Controllers' in the device manager, and when I upgraded from 6.0.1.8036 to 6.0.1.8186 (dated 6/14/2017), I started having issues. I reinstalled the .8036 driver and it went back to doing sound normally.

This didn't affect only Path of Exile, it also was messing with my desktop sounds, making my IM chimes sound way quieter and making other apps far-louder. Maybe reinstalling 8186 would have fixed it, but I didn't try that. It only became a problem right after I'd upgraded both my Video (NVidia to 384.94; working fine so far on my 780Ti) driver and my sound driver...so if it wasn't one, it had to be the other! I include all the extra details in case it helps someone else.

For forcing the game to check itself...one option might be to rename the PathOfExile_x64.exe to something else and then run the patcher; it should hopefully realize that there's a missing bit and replace it. If it doesn't...well, just name the file back and I dunno. There is a PackCheck.exe in the game folder, but I don't know what it does.

Sorry I can't help much, and good luck!