Well, I've done more than my share of fixing audio problems around SCFA - and inevitably it has revolved around either an errant sound device that no one bothered to suspect (or remove) - such as those created by some video cards or multimedia monitors - OR - USB headsets with some kind of processing to simulate surround sound. Once those two sources are eliminated (and simply disabling or removing the device helps) - that generally leaves only the onboard sound or the rare discrete sound card.
Just for my interest, what is R2.82 ? And you're right - it is a software compatibility issue. SCFA was written for the XACT audio system, which, at the time, was being pushed as a defacto standard for surround sound by Microsoft. It was not widely adopted but this game was one of the early guinea pigs - and it still suffers for it today. No one has developed games for XACT audio (let alone this very early version of it) in almost a decade at this point.