DarkJaguar: The above statement is accurate as it turns out. Never mind my previous post, I had stumbled on the "hardware acceleration" option in the sound menu. It was flipped to "on" when there was another setting, OpenAL, that it wasn't apparent was available. I'm all set up now and have avoided ALchemy for another game.
So now comes the big question. Does this solution work in Windows 8? I'm using Windows 7, and am not yet sure how much further MS has deprecated accelerated sound support. I've heard that I can't even use a 3rd party tool to set my MIDI acceleration in Windows 8, which really hurts the audio quality of many retro games that I set up custom to use General MIDI just to avoid retro SB16 style instruments.
How to set up proper MIDI in W8.