For some reason, the radio and TV broadcasts are very hard to hear. Even some side conversations.

I have a similar problem, but for me, i can't hear them at all.
Even the audio for cars, flying ships, weapons not used by V, they are all missing / not playing for me.

I only played about 30 mins but I was getting some random crackling towards the end of my play time.

I had it myself. Setting the audio output format to 48Khz 16 bit fixed it for me.

yep, this helps

I found the problem.
I'm using a seperate DAC and AMP for my headphones, using those, the sounds are missing, using a simple USB-soundcard and plugging my headphones into there fixed the issue.

Please CDPR, find out what exactly causes this.

Was going to try that and see if it helped. Thanks for confirming and sharing.

I couldn't hear music or NPC voices, Lizzies was almost completely silent.

Not sure what fixed it in the end because I installed the latest Nvidia drivers which included a newer Realtek sound driver, and I also connected my headphones directly to the output on the motherboard, rather than going via my monitor.

I set the sampling rate to 24bit 48KHz, but once in game it changed to 32bit 48KHz automatically.

Problem solved!

Sound is always output in 7.1 format even when headphones or 2.1 speakers are connected. You can check it here: Control Panel - Sound - Speakers (select from the list) - Properties - Levels - Play Control (Balance) - and you will see a list of all channels.

This is solved by the fact that either in the settings of the sound card it is necessary to switch it to the mode of headphones / speakers 2.1 or turn off all additional methods of sound processing. Or switch to a sound card that only has stereo sound.

In my case, this solution helped:
Control Panel - Sound - Speakers (select from the list) - Properties - Advanced - Enable additional sound processing tools (check the box).

I also had missing sounds. None of the above fixed the issue.

The solution for me was to disable my HMD (Reverb G1) within Device Manager.

So if you have other 'sound' related hardare, maybe try temporarily disabling it. Worked for me.

I experience another strange sound issue. The moment I plug in a Dualshock 4 controller, all sounds and music are completely gone. They come back the moment I plug the controller out. And this does not happen with a 360 controller.

Is it auto switching the audio to the controllers headphone socket? That used to happen to me sometimes with a DS4.

That is an interesting idea, right now I am away to bring some love in form of christmas packages to the postal service, but when I am back I will try this immediately. Still strange, I've never seen a game behave like this ever before with the DS4.