Awesome, glad that helped and thanks for the update!

I wonder if there is something going on with scheduling waits that is impacting the audio process. I would first try upping the CPU units in Processors->Advanced settings for the VM, bump it to something like 200. Otherwise, if you over subscribing your CPU cores, try temporarily dropping the number of cores subbed out to your VMs to match the physical host to see if it helps, since that could help resolve scheduling issues as well.